Inflation once again spiked in June, with prices rising at an annualized 2.6%—a 0.3% rise from a month prior and the largest spike since February, the Commerce Department announced on Thursday.
“No matter what horizon you’re looking at, this is too high,” Harvard economics professor Jason Furman wrote in a post on X.
This was concerning Personal Consumption Expenditure Inflation, which is the rate at which prices for goods and services purchased by consumers in the United States are rising or falling. The price increases were almost certainly thanks to President Donald Trump’s idiotic trade policy, as he’s put tariffs on imports from key U.S. trading partners that companies are now passing on to consumers. Trump vowed he would end inflation on “Day One” of his presidency.
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis data, prices for imported goods saw the biggest spikes, with furnishings and durable household equipment up 1.3% last month—the biggest spike of any category of spending.
“Yes we are starting to see signs of tariffs being passed onto consumers,” Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote in a post on X, adding that, “there will be more to come…”
Indeed, a number of companies have announced that they are going to increase prices due to the tariffs, with the giant consumer goods company Procter & Gamble announcing on Monday that it plans to raise prices on popular household products such as Tide laundry detergent and Charmin toilet paper.
“There will be some price increases,” chairman and CEO Jon Moeller told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday. “We’re going to try to combine those with innovation. … We’re also working hard to reduce cost to minimize the impact of those price increases.”
Meanwhile, the BEA report also said consumer spending was weak in June, a sign that the economic uncertainty thanks to Trump’s tariffs, as well as the price increases from the levies, are keeping consumers from opening their wallets.
“Consumer spending was weak in June and overall is down in the first six months of 2025,” Furman said, adding the troubling data point that, “the last times this happened was COVID and financial crisis.”
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Even worse for Americans is that Trump’s deadline to raise tariffs even higher on imports from a number of other countries is set for Friday.
Trump said that the Aug. 1 deadline is firm, and that he will not chicken out and delay the increase as he’s done multiple times before, earning him the pejorative nickname TACO Don which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.
Even worse is that the trade deals Trump has announced ahead of the deadline are terrible for Americans, and will almost certainly spike prices on everything from medications to cars.
It’s why Americans—including Trump’s own supporters—hate Trump’s tariff policy. A YouGov poll released Wednesday found that 54% of voters believe tariffs hurt American consumers the most, and that 71% of voters believe Trump’s tariffs will increase prices.