Americans Were Promised Lower Living Costs, But Rising Utility Bills Tell a Completely Different Story

Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on specific numbers. Gasoline below $2 a gallon. Mortgage rates at 2%. Credit card interest capped near 10%. Electricity and energy prices cut by at least half. CBS News measured each pledge against federal and industry data running through October 2025, and the results split in several directions at once.

A CBS News poll taken ahead of the November 2025 midterms found nine in 10 Americans naming prices as the single most important factor shaping how they view the economy. That holds even though growth remained solid and unemployment stayed low. Groceries, gasoline, electricity and health insurance all cost more. Car insurance, credit card rates and prescription drugs cost less.

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Falling car insurance had little to do with Washington

In Asheville, North Carolina, on August 14, 2024, Trump said car insurance had climbed 70% to 100% and told the crowd prices would come down fast. Premiums did fall. Motorists paid 5.5% less for vehicle coverage after rates peaked in February 2025.

The explanation offered by the economist CBS News asked points away from policy. Yelena Shulyatyeva, senior U.S. economist at The Conference Board, a nonprofit representing businesses, attributed the decline to insurers competing harder for customers. “Some of the deceleration was a result of a pushback from consumers, rather than some legislative or other action,” she said. Premiums remain elevated against their pre-pandemic level, since insurers price against the replacement cost of new and used vehicles, both of which rose sharply.

Tariffs added 2.9 percentage points to inflation

Two administration decisions show up directly in the price data, according to the researchers who measured them. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York calculated that the tariff regime contributed roughly 2.9 percentage points to inflation through February 2025. Absent those tariffs, the New York Fed researchers concluded, goods prices would have fallen rather than risen.

The second was military. The United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February 2025, and the conflict that followed disrupted oil shipments. “It’s undeniable that several of these supply shocks that the U.S. economy has been navigating through come from policy decisions made by the administration, namely, decisions to intervene in Iran and decisions to impose tariffs,” said Greg Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.

Natural gas bills more than doubled in seven months

The largest single percentage move in the data belongs to natural gas. Energy Information Administration figures show average monthly residential natural gas prices rose 106% between December 2024 and July 2025. Residential electricity costs climbed 12.5% over that same stretch.

Set that against the pledge. At the Asheville rally on August 14, 2024, Trump committed to cutting energy and electricity prices by half, at least half. Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan policy and research firm, attributes the natural gas jump to four forces working together: geopolitical conflict, higher domestic exports, extreme weather tied to climate change, and the cost of replacing aging infrastructure. Utilities are also spending to upgrade a power grid now serving a wave of new data center demand.

Jet fuel at $4.34 pushed airfares 17% above January

Airfares sat 17% higher than January 2025 in Consumer Price Index data, despite easing somewhat over the preceding months. Trump had named airfares specifically in his September 5, 2024 speech at the Economic Club of New York, grouping them with electricity, groceries and housing as costs he would bring down.

Fuel is the mechanism. It is the second-largest expense airlines carry, behind labor. EIA figures put jet fuel at $4.34 a gallon, up 85% from the $2.35 average in January 2025. The Iran conflict pulled supply out of the global oil market and carriers passed the bill forward. Aviation analysts name a second factor with no connection to fuel: the May 2025 shutdown of budget carrier Spirit Airlines removed a competitor that had pressured fares on overlapping routes.

Diesel at $6.28 rides inside the grocery bill

Shoppers tracking only the shelf price miss where part of the increase originates. Diesel hit a record $6.53 per gallon on September 22, 2025 and settled near $6.28. That fuel runs farm equipment, the trucks moving crops to processors, and the trucks moving packaged goods to supermarkets. Economists told CBS News it feeds into consumer prices for nearly every category of good.

Food prepared at home cost 4% more than in November 2024, when Trump told a Pittsburgh crowd that a vote for him meant cheaper groceries. That 4% sits on top of a 23% rise across the four years before it. Anyone comparing a current receipt against a 2019 receipt is looking at both numbers stacked.

Why shoppers compare against 2019, not last month

Economists interviewed by CBS News point to a specific habit behind the gap between reported statistics and household mood. People do not benchmark against last quarter. They benchmark against what they remember paying before the pandemic.

“Consumers judge the prices they’re paying against the prices they paid four or five years ago, and are still shocked by it,” said Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. “As a result of that, they think the economy’s doing very, very badly.” Daco described the same effect in different terms. “Whether it’s talking about gas prices or grocery prices or restaurant prices or travel prices, everybody talks about inflation,” he said. “The salience of prices is what is driving this downbeat consumer morale.” Five years of accumulated post-pandemic inflation predates the current term.

Prescription drugs fell 3.9% with competition in play

Government data show prescription drug prices dropped 3.9% after peaking in February 2025. The White House stated in August 2025 that the president “has delivered” on his campaign promise, citing the “most favored nation” approach that ties U.S. drug prices to those paid in other developed countries.

Analysts told CBS News the policies helped and were not acting alone. Manufacturers of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs cut prices as competing products entered the market. The nonpartisan Brookings Institution points to a larger supply of generic drugs reaching pharmacies, which pulls down the average across the category. Credit card rates moved in the same direction without the policy that was proposed for them: the average rate across commercial bank accounts was 20.94%, down from 21.58%, after the 10% cap proposal stalled in Congress.

Atlanta Fed measures a $40,000 affordability gap

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta tracks the distance between the income a household needs to afford a median home and the income households actually have. That gap, $126,487 needed against $86,490 earned, is the widest the bank has recorded since 2005.

The pledge was explicit. At a Tucson rally on September 12, 2024, Trump said rates would be driven down so buyers could pay 2% again and refinance at much lower cost. Freddie Mac put the average conventional 30-year mortgage at 7.28%, against 7.04% at the start of the term. The path was not smooth: rates briefly dipped under 5% in February 2025 before climbing as government bond yields surged. Zillow recorded a median list price of $408,333 in August 2025, up 4%.

ACA premiums rose 58% after a subsidy expired

The sharpest increase in the data lands on people buying their own health coverage. A May 2025 analysis by KFF, a nonprofit health research group, found average monthly Affordable Care Act premiums reached $178, or $2,136 annually, a 58% rise from 2025 levels. Average deductibles went from $1,027 per person to $3,786.

The trigger was legislative. Congress allowed a tax subsidy that reduced plan costs to expire at the end of the prior year. In September 2025 the administration began sending $500 checks to nearly 1 million ACA enrollees across 30 states. White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told CBS News the agenda “stopped Biden’s inflation crisis” and listed tax cuts, drug pricing, trade deals and private-sector job growth among its results. Open enrollment paperwork is where households will see their own figure.