![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://uknews.evprotec.com/inflation-miscalculation-threatens-to-derail-joe-bidens-midterms/&media=https://uknews.evprotec.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/TELEMMGLPICT000315022918_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqzZqOgOJXOqkE_ZaqGDwVPHwSCF1R0VweJ7DS2UnVMSQ.jpeg&description=American workers complain everything is going up. Rents, restaurant meals, cars, food. Analysis by Goldman Sachs shows the price of around half of the inflation basket tracked by the Federal Reserve is rising by more than 6pc a year. A shortage of parts during the pandemic led to a surge in second-hand car prices, which is only just starting to abate. Randy Krozner, a former Federal Reserve official, knows this all too well. When he moved back to Chicago recently after living in London for more than two years, he thought it was time to buy a new car when his 2004 Audi A4 wouldn't start after lying dormant for two years. "The question was, do I spend thousands of dollars to get it working again? Or do I just buy a new one? And it was so expensive to buy any car that I decided to keep it running." Krozner believes the post-pandemic surge in inflation will come back to haunt him. "The Biden team made a miscalculation," he says. "They were focusing on spending more to garner votes and they thought that would make people feel happy. But their economic stimulus came on top of a lot of stimulus that had come before that." The professor of economics at Chicago Booth says Covid took the economy into uncharted territory. "One thing that nobody fully anticipated is how difficult it is to restart an economy that has been completely shut down," he says. "You can't just turn the lights off and then back on again. And demand shifted dramatically within a few months. Peloton is a classic example, where everybody wanted one, and then by the time they invested enough to make more, nobody wanted a Peloton. And it was very difficult to predict how that demand would shift.'){kind=link}
The rising cost of living is front-of-mind as voters head to the ballot box
Cleveland’s skyline has changed dramatically over the past hundred years.
The plants that used to make gun and engine parts for B-29 aircraft during the Second World War are long closed, and the city is now best known for its medical breakthroughs via the Cleveland Clinic, which employs more than 50,000 people.
A huge retail complex sits on a former steel finishing mill site in the heart of the city, though the blast furnaces and chimneys that tower over the now abandoned plants serve as a constant reminder that this is Rust Belt territory.
But whether it is cars, chemicals or cataract surgery, businesses in Cleveland are facing the same challenges. Prices are rising. Talent is scarce. And economic and political uncertainty is growing.