The root of what’s going on here can feel obvious: blame inflation, which picked up in mid-2021 and throughout 2022. But that isn’t really the issue anymore, at least not at the current rate, because inflation is coming down. The actual problem here is prices.
They’re not going up nearly as much as they were in, say, the middle of last year, but they’re by and large not declining en masse, either. And in most cases, they won’t get back to where they were in the Before Times.
Republicans have spent decades hindering federal regulatory bodies when they can’t order them to stand down completely. It may be regulatory failure, but it isn’t all their fault. It’s the fault of free market cultists who were inadvisably given the power to keep the government from doing its job.