{"id":66397,"date":"2023-12-21T15:00:37","date_gmt":"2023-12-21T20:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66397"},"modified":"2023-12-21T15:00:37","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T20:00:37","slug":"americans-understand-inflation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66397","title":{"rendered":"Americans Understand Inflation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Americans<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Americans Understand Inflation<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
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Everyday Americans understand inflation perfectly. But the egghead economists and policymakers who govern their lives don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

That may be because inflation is one of the biggest concerns of those who live in the real world, and it may lead to a political earthquake next November in the presidential and congressional elections.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the reality and here\u2019s the political narrative: Reality is that prices have been going up at the fastest rate in 40 years and they are still going up.<\/p>\n

Inflation (on an annualized basis) was 9.1% in June 2022, 4.9% in April 2023, 3.7% in September 2023 and 3.1% in November 2023 (the most recent data available).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that the\u00a0rate<\/i>\u00a0of inflation is coming down, but\u00a0prices are still going up<\/i>. They\u2019re going up at a slower rate but they\u2019re still going up.<\/p>\n

Not only that, but past price increases are locked in so new price increases are applied to a higher base. This is killing American consumers.<\/p>\n

The average price of a pound of ground beef in the U.S. was $5.11 in September 2023. In October 2023 the price of a pound of ground beef was $5.23. That\u2019s a 2.3% increase on a month-over-month basis, which annualizes to over 25%.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the kind of inflation that real Americans confront every day.<\/p>\n

The economists prefer measures of inflation that exclude energy and food prices, what they call \u201ccore\u201d inflation. Some eggheads use measures that exclude food, energy and housing costs. They call that \u201csuper-core\u201d inflation.<\/p>\n

Those measures are academic constructs and bear no relationship to the real world. Try living without gas in your car, food on the table or a place to live.<\/p>\n

The ignorance of politicians gets worse when we see Joe Biden come out and say, \u201cPrices are going down,\u201d and retailers should lower their prices and avoid \u201cprice gouging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden is purposely confusing lower rates of inflation (which are still price increases) with lower prices (which are not happening).<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Americans Understand Inflation Everyday Americans understand inflation perfectly. But the egghead economists and policymakers who govern their lives don\u2019t. That may be because inflation is one of the biggest concerns of those who live in the real world, and it may lead to a political earthquake next November in the presidential and congressional elections. Here\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11023,13599,13351],"class_list":["post-66397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-daily-reckoning","tag-james-rickards","tag-price-inflation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66398,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66397\/revisions\/66398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}