Push a cart down any grocery aisle in Connecticut right now, and you can feel it. Beef is up more than 10% over the past year. Meat, dairy, cereal, bread and bakery, four of the six major grocery categories, climbed again last month. Groceries cost more than they did a year ago, and more than they did the month before. This isn’t in your head. It’s on your receipt.
Here’s what makes it worse. In 2024, Donald Trump stood behind a table stacked with groceries and promised your prices would come down, starting on Day One. Not eventually. Day One. It never happened. Prices rose. He even admitted to a reporter that bringing costs down would be "very hard," before now claiming inflation is "defeated" and prices are falling. Look at your receipt, then decide which one you believe.
The numbers tell the story he will not. American inflation is the highest in the G7, higher than Canada, Britain, Japan, France, Germany and Italy. Our closest allies live in the same world economy we do, and their families are not getting hit like ours are. So what is different here? Two choices, and Trump made both. He put tariffs on the everyday goods you buy, and he started a war no one wanted.
Let's be honest about that war, because you’re paying for it every time you shop. Trump's war in Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which carries about a quarter of the world's oil, and sent crude prices soaring. That cost rides in on the delivery truck, soaks into the fertilizer on the farm, and lands on the shelf in front of you. And the war never settles. He signs a memorandum one week and resumes the bombing the next, calls it over, then calls it back on. Call it a cease fire, or whatever this week's headline says, the chaos itself is a tax, because oil markets never calm down and neither do your prices. Endless war abroad, higher prices at home. Trump chose the war. You are getting the bill.
And while Washington was making your food more expensive, it stopped keeping it safe. Last summer, Trump's CDC gutted the program that tracks foodborne illness, cutting required monitoring from eight pathogens to two and making surveillance of a stomach parasite named cyclospora optional for the first time since 1997. In a typical year, the country sees a few hundred to about a thousand cases. This summer, cyclospora is tearing across the country, with more than 1,600 confirmed cases across 34 states, thousands more under investigation, and more than 140 people hospitalized. So here’s where the Trump regime has left you: food you can barely afford, from a supply they no longer bother to watch.
Now here is what your state did with those same years. When families first told us their grocery bills were out of control, we did not shrug, and we did not lie. We looked. At our request, the Connecticut attorney general opened a formal inquiry into grocery prices, pulling the numbers on nine everyday staples, and state Sen. Martin Looney and I fought to extend that authority up the whole supply chain, past the grocer to the distributors and producers. We told you the truth. The store on your corner was not gouging you. The costs are getting baked in higher up the chain, and a war Washington chose is making them worse.
Then we acted on the part we control. We passed the largest income tax cut in Connecticut history, the first rate cut since the 1990s, saving a typical middle class household about $600 a year and roughly $300 for single filers. We raised the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families. We tied the minimum wage to the cost of living, so it rose to $16.94 an hour this January automatically, no waiting on Republicans in Washington. And we did it while paying down billions in long-term debt and funding our towns and childcare, instead of running up the tab.
This is what the choice comes down to. One government makes a promise on a stage, breaks it, and then insists you are not seeing what you are seeing. Another does the quiet, unglamorous work of actually lowering your costs and then tells you the truth about the rest. Prices are still too high, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But a state that levels with you and delivers where it can is worth more than a president who lies to you and blames the world. Connecticut will keep leveling with you, and we will keep delivering.
