The White House Wants You to Stop Panicking About Your Grocery Bill
The advice nobody asked for
If you've been to a grocery store lately and felt a quiet, low-grade rage at the price of eggs, orange juice, or a box of cereal, you are not alone. And yet, Kevin Hassett — one of President Trump's top economic advisers — is out today with a message that might test your patience: consumers, he says, should learn to "smooth through" the ups and downs in prices. In other words, don't panic. It'll even out.
Now, before you close this tab, it's worth actually unpacking what he means — because there's a real economic idea buried in there, even if the timing of saying it out loud feels a little tone-deaf.
What "smoothing through" actually means
In economics, "consumption smoothing" is a concept that describes how people ideally manage their spending over time — not dramatically cutting back when things get expensive, and not going on a wild spending spree when prices dip. The idea is that stability in your spending patterns, rather than reacting to every price jolt, leads to better financial outcomes over a lifetime.
Hassett's point, delivered today, appears to be that the current in consumer prices — the stuff going up, the stuff coming down, the whiplash of -driven cost changes rippling through supply chains — is something Americans should mentally absorb rather than catastrophize about. The government, in this framing, is working on the big levers. Your job is to not make things worse by panicking.
It's not a crazy idea in a textbook. But it's a harder sell when the price of a weekly shop has climbed meaningfully over the past few years and wages, for many households, haven't kept pace in a way that feels real.
Why this is being said right now
The timing here is important. The US economy in mid-2026 is navigating a genuinely complicated moment. Tariffs introduced over the past year have pushed up the cost of imported goods — everything from electronics to clothing to certain foods. At the same time, some of those -related price spikes are starting to work their way through the system, which means certain prices could ease in the coming months.
The — the US central bank that sets interest rates to control — has been watching all of this very carefully. Interest rates remain elevated compared to where they were a few years ago, which is 's way of tapping the brakes on an economy it worries could overheat. Higher rates mean higher borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards. So households are feeling pressure from multiple directions at once: prices that are still high, and credit that's still expensive.
Against this backdrop, an adviser telling people to "smooth through" it reads, to many, less like wisdom and more like a shrug.
What this means for your actual wallet
Here's the honest version of what's going on. Some price pressures are genuinely starting to ease — particularly in goods that were hit hardest by supply chain chaos during and after the pandemic. But services — think rent, insurance, healthcare, restaurant meals — have remained stubbornly expensive, and those are the costs that tend to feel most personal because you can't really shop around or delay them.
The official rate has come down significantly from its peak, but "lower " doesn't mean prices have dropped — it just means they're rising more slowly. Everything is still more expensive than it was three years ago. That distinction matters enormously for people managing real household budgets.
What Hassett's comment signals, perhaps unintentionally, is that the administration is bracing for more short-term price noise — likely from ongoing negotiations and global supply shifts — and is trying to get ahead of the narrative. Whether that's reassuring or frustrating probably depends on how your last grocery run went.
For now, the most useful takeaway isn't to "smooth through" anything — it's to recognize that this particular stretch of economic uncertainty isn't over yet, and building a little financial buffer where you can is more practical advice than waiting for someone in Washington to tell you it's all going to be fine.