September 7, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation in the United States cooled in June for a third straight month, though prices are still up 3% from last year.
In a better-than-expected report, consumer prices declined 0.1% from May to June after having remained flat the previous month, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the first monthly decline in overall inflation since May 2020.
Even as inflation slows, though, the costs of food, rent, health care and other necessities remain much higher than they were before the pandemic — a source of public discontent and a potential threat to President Joe Biden’s re-election bid.
In June, gas prices plunged for a second straight month, tumbling 3.8% on average nationwide from May. Gas prices are now down 2.5% from a year ago.
Grocery prices ticked up by a slight 0.1% last month, the first increase in five months, and are just 1.1% higher than a year ago. Food prices are still up, on average, 21% from March 2021, when inflation started to surge.
Excluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called core prices climbed just 0.1% from May to June, below the 0.2% increase in the previous month. Measured from 12 months earlier, core prices rose 3.3% in June, down from 3.4% May. Core prices are thought to provide a particularly telling signal of where inflation is likely headed.
The cost of new and used cars also fell last month. Used car prices, which had soared during the recovery from the pandemic, have dropped 10.1% in the past year.
Rental and homeownership costs, which make up more than one-third of the entire consumer price index, rose at a slower pace last month — 0.3% from May to June. That is the mildest such increase in nearly three years. Compared with a year earlier, rents in June were still up 5.1%.
A jump in her rent at the start of this year delivered a painful blow to Deborah Stettler's finances. Stettler, a 51-year old resident of Quincy, Massachusetts, said her rent soared in January from $1,500 a month to $2,000.
A single mother with a 16-year-old son, Stettler is also still struggling with the sharp run-up in food prices over the past three years. She gets about half her family's food from a local food pantry. For the rest, she looks for sales at grocery stores.
Stettler landed a new job about nine months ago, in children's services, after having worked before then at a YMCA branch.
“Rent has gone up, food has gone up, the pay doesn’t go up,” she said. “I’m still going to the food pantry for food help, because by the time you pay all your bills, you don’t really have a lot of money left for food.”
