How’s dropping prices for everyday folks going?
Figure 1: CPI all (black), CPI for food (tan), Everyday Price Index (green), all in logs, 2025M01=0. Source: BLS, AIER, and author’s calculations.
Median household income CPI is not available for 2025. However, over 2024, it tracks the CPI overall (both in nsa terms) very closely. Hence, extrapolating forward, the CPI all should proxy fairly well median income CPI.
As noted in the last post, data collection has declined over the past few years, due to budget constraints. One might hope to access alternative measures would shed light on whether the reported CPI has experienced degradation in accuracy. However, in some instances, alternatives are merely transformations of BLS reported data. For instance, the AIER’s Everyday Price Index (“EPI”) is a weighted average of a subset of CPI categories.
We have alternatives to official data for employment and for inflation. Also for vehicle, chain store and home sales. Rubbing various fata series together – imports with consumption, electrical production with manufacturing output – will be more necessary, just as it long has been with Chinese data.
Keeping score in government stats will be important, as will be keeping score without government stats. Up to us to know what’s going on in the economy.
Sadly, tracking U.S. economic performance is already highly politicized, and keeping false narratives in check is a large part of the public discussion of the economy. Heritage exists. AEI, too. As we have to rely more heavily on non-government sources of data, there’ll be more opportunity to politicize economic analysis. Little Antoni and his ilk, Brucie and his, are already well-practiced at obscuring reality. Bad data will make their efforts easier.
A little context – degradation of economic data is part of s wider effort tokeep us misinformed. Faux news has been at it for as long as there has been a faux news, but now other news outlets have decide “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” is what the Founders had in mind when they wrote press freedom into the Constitution.
Look at what’s happening with CBS. A rich guy with ties to the felon-in-chief is angling to buy it, and plans to put a neo-liberal zionist agitator, Bari Weiss, in the ear of the CBS news director once he owns the network. Redstone is firing Colbert to gease the deal. The Washington Post is now required to give pro-plutocrat pep talks. NYT news reporting – not just editorials – is cheerleading for the Bibi/felon-in-chief’s anti-Muslim, Palestinian genocide crusade.
Our corporate press cheered for a war of choice in Iraq. It regularly lets the need for “access” dictate what gets reported. But what we’re seeing now is different, vastly worse. Journalists, editors, execs and owners all know that press freedom, civil liberty and democracy are under attack, and they’re renting out space to the attackers.
Oh, this is great, from economist Mohamed El-Erian.
“The attacks on Chair Powell are now extending to the whole institution. The longer Powell stays in power, the more that process will continue, fundamentally threatening the independence of the Fed,” said Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of bond giant PIMCO,
I would be fascinated to hear his take on wife-beating — “Why do you keep doing things that make him hit you? You are threatening the stability of your family.”