Black America is suffering disproportionately in Biden’s inflation nation. It's time for a change.

A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York confirms what far too many of us already know. Bidenomics is breaking the economic back of Black America.

The June report found that Black and Hispanic Americans are seeing higher rates of inflation than the national average. Adjusted for spending levels, the inflation rate for Black Americans was 0.2 percentage point higher than the national average. For Hispanic Americans, it was roughly 0.6 percentage point higher than the national average.

The reasons why inflation hits Black and brown people harder than others is simple. We have less money on average than other groups, and we spend more of the money we do have on things that are affected the most by inflation. Take transportation, for example. Gas prices and the cost of used cars have soared since President Joe Biden’s economic nightmare began, and the report found that Black Americans spend more of their income on transportation than white Americans do.

Democrats claim to care about minorities

But the June report is just the most recent set of data showing that under the Democrats’ latest reign, those they often loudly claim to care most about suffer more than anyone else.

A study published in April by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that everyday necessities, including electricity and wireless phone service, also make up a larger proportion of Black Americans’ budgets: "If prices paid by White households increase by 7 percent over a year, our calculations suggest that one may expect them to increase by 7.5 percent for Black households."

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This study echoed another released in November by Bank of America, which found that Black, Hispanic and Latino households spent 7.1% of their post-tax income on energy compared with 5.4% spent by other demographic groups and 12.5% of their income on food compared with11.1% for others.

Unfortunately, it appears that things are only going to get worse for Black Americans suffering in Biden’s inflation nation. In June, U.S. consumer prices spiked by 9.1% – the fastest pace in more than a generation, suggesting that inflation will continue to get much worse before it gets any better.

Inflation is a hidden tax on poor people, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty is nearly double our percentage of the population. According to the U.S. Census, in 2019 Black Americans represented 23.8% of the population living in poverty while accounting for only 13.2% of the population.

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And as prices on core essentials like gas and electricity rise, Black Americans have even less money to offset the sharp rise in food and other consumer goods.

"It's going to be extremely devastating" to the Black community, William Darity Jr., professor of public policy, African American studies and economics at Duke University told CNN last month. "People will have to make very, very hard decisions about whether or not to purchase medicines or buy food or forgo payment of their utilities. It will have harsh effects on people's well-being."

Black American voters turning away

We can’t keep going down this road. The Democratic Party’s reckless, economy-killing policies are driving up the prices of consumer goods and products across the board, while simultaneously preventing economic growth that could create more jobs for Black Americans. And make no mistake: This ever-worsening economy is the fault of the Biden administration, which seems to have gone out of its way to make inflation worse by stifling U.S. energy production and implementing policies that exacerbated, and indeed might be responsible, for the supply chain crisis.

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Faced with an increasingly bleak economic future, it's no wonder many Black Americans who voted for President Biden are slowly starting to turn against his administration. As the economy continues to decline under the Democrats’ rule, his approval rating among the Black community is likely to decline further.

We know what life was like before President Biden took office, and we know how bad things have gotten – and how fast they got there – since.

DaQuawn Bruce is the executive director of Concerned Communities for America, an organization focused on facilitating political liberation and social transformation of communities of color across America. 

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joe Biden's economic policies drive inflation and hurt Black Americans