GOVERNMENT INFLATION NUMBERS ARE MEANINGLESS

We are told that inflation is 3.2% and since that government number is lower than the government number from last July, we consumers should be happy. The inflation number reported each month is the so-called core inflation number which removes food and energy. The government removes the items we buy every day. We buy food and gas every day. We pay electric and gas bills every month. We do not buy a new or used car every day, every month, every year, but maybe every five or seven years. The same is true for appliances, but they are items in the so-called core inflation rate.
Three years ago, the average gas price in California was $3.18. Today it is $5.12. The price of oil in August of 2020 was $45 a barrel, today it is $82 a barrel. That means energy costs will be going even higher. Heidi Leggett, a mother of five boys in southwest Virginia, has seen her family’s monthly spending on groceries increase from $2,200 to $3,000 in recent months. Like many across the U.S., her family is buying less and being more frugal with meals as prices of just about every food item have risen.
“We either have no leftovers or we plan a larger meal so we can eat leftovers for a few days,” says Leggett, who recently went back to work as a lobbyist to help her family deal with inflation. “Our quality of life has gone down. Worrying all of the time about what could be next is frightening. All we can think about is making our kids know that we will be OK, and they will be taken care of.”
Inflation is very personal. If I do not buy the new electric Cadillac that costs $130,000, that price means nothing to me. But the egg price, the cost of apples, the cost of my weekly grocery bill is very meaningful. The extra $10 or more every time I fill my car with gas is meaningful. When I hear that inflation is now 3% and I should be happy, I am not because it is a meaningless number. My meaningful inflation number is based on those items I buy every day and not on some meaningless number devised by some academic that includes items they think are important.
This is how the government fails. The typical bureaucrat is an academic and produces theoretical numbers and solutions that have little to no relevance to daily life. Bidenomics, or the Biden economic policies are destined and rejected because they are telling the American people to believe something that our daily expenses tell us are not true.