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The metrics are gamed and don't really exist.
Inflation is "good" because it's not increasing as fast as it was -- it's still increasing after all. And the previous increases didn't go away. Not to mention that "core inflation" excludes housing and gas and food, as if home prices reaching unaffordable highs is some sort of triviality when The Economy Is Doing Great.
Unemployment is good because the numbers are gamed in a million ways. A typical pattern these last few years has been for employment figures to be "better than expected" when first announced, then quietly revised to much lower numbers a few months later. But it's always been a gamed figure, when people who stop looking for work are no longer counted as employed.
The economy is growing? Remember when they changed the definition of a recession because they didn't want to admit we were in one?
This latest media narrative is one if the most shameless I think I've ever seen. The economy must be doing well, because we've proclaimed it. And since no one believes us, we have to understand what's causing all this irrationality. Is this the dark undercurrent of the post-truth society Freud exposed by tapping into our deep inner pathologies? Are Republicans just that impervious to the truth? Sure, whatever you say I guess, your twelve inches are amazing President Biden, I must not be feeling it because I've been such a naughty boy.
Yeah, it's literally impossible to square reported inflation numbers with the lived experience of watching housing costs explode 50-200% higher, rent explode 25-50% higher, or the prices of staple foods doubling. To whatever degree the CPI is or isn't a lie is besides the point. It's almost completely unrepresentative of how people are experiencing the cost of goods. I truthfully couldn't give a shit that flat screen TVs are cheaper. I'm not buying one every month.
"Housing costs" as defined in that link would be housing costs for someone becoming a homeowner for the first time. I agree that it's rough if you're a first-time homeowner but that's a pretty small slice of the population. Most people already have homes (so house price increases are good) and have fixed rate mortgages (so rate increases are irrelevant).
The rent chart you showed has rental prices increasing at about a 6-7% annual rate, which I agree is annoyingly high but doesn't seem catastrophic?
Staple foods are a pretty small share of people's consumption basket. (Food at home is about 4% of people's expenditures: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/)
Ultimately you're getting at something correct, but I don't think in the way you meant it to be. There's a huge disconnect between what people think the economy is (that people mostly consume lettuce and mayonnaise and half of the economy are coal miners) and what it actually is.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
For starters, even your own source says the total amount of "Food at home" is 6%, plus another 6% for "Food away from home", making "Total food" 12%. Three times higher. And yeah, 12% of your budget jumping between 50-100% over the course of a single presidency is a pretty serious strain on the average household.
Same thing goes for rent. We aren't just talking about the last year. We're talking about the entire era of "Bidenomics". Coming up on 4 years of "only 6-7% inflation" makes for over 25% inflation total. If it had just been 2% we'd be looking at 8% inflation. That statistica link I shared, which now expects me to become a member god damnit, showed average rent jumping from ~$1000 to over $1300. To say nothing of how highly regional rent can be. In my area I had a buddy's rent jump up 25% in one year when he renewed.
If you own you aren't out of the woods yet. God help you if you have to move. If your family grows. If you divorce. If you need to move for work. It's no fun knowing if you have to move for any reason you can expect to pay 2x or more your current mortgage on a comparable home. You basically just got knocked off the housing wealth ladder completely.
Throw whatever food categories you want, the point is people spend a tiny amount of their income on food.
Yeah I mean landlords are famously slow and chunky while adjusting. Sorry that happened to a guy you know.
The point is people are out here talking like there’s some conspiracy to hide the fact that prices 100% higher than they used to be when in fact they aren’t and wages have increased along with the modest price increases.
All that aside, the following facts:
Really kind of gives away what’s happening, right?
Why are you so stuck on being wrong? 12% is not a tiny amount! It's trades for second or third place in spending categories behind housing and, often times, transportation.
The rhetorical dynamic is the following:
economists have thought really hard about how to measure inflation and have sophisticated data and tools to do it. They do their thing and say that year over year inflation is 4% or whatever.
weird zerohedge people notice that mayonnaise prices at target are higher by 75% and from this conclude that the federal reserve is lying about inflation.
I think people in #2 get confused because food is so important to live while flat screen tvs are not. So when food prices go up they think a lot of people must be about to starve. It’s useful to point out to these confused people that food, while necessary to live, is so cheap relative to Americans’ income that food prices can increase a lot and it doesn’t really matter. Hence headline inflation can be low even though mayonnaise at target seems expensive, and nevertheless headline inflation is the thing we should care about.
How is any of that a rebuttal to you being point of fact wrong about how much people spend on food, and how impactful food inflation is to them?
I mean sure, if 3% vs 12% is what changes your mind then fine, but this seems like totally missing the point. I can find some other small sliver of consumption where prices are down or flat. Most people are out there acting concerned as if food is 50% of people’s spending.
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