Inflation is 4.17% excluding fuel, food, and housing, what is it really?

Can any of the DU economists tell us the true number, the formula the government uses is good for them, since we all use fuel, food, and housing what is the true number?

If I could figure my budget by excluding fuel, food, and housing, I'd be living on easy street.

At the rate the prices are rising, we might just end up there. I don't know how young families do it, with the price of groceries.

today. I don't know how they do it either. back then I would only spend 20 maybe 30 bucks on groceries a week, car payment under 100 bucks a month. Neither of those is true for him. It Sucks

I could take twenty bucks and have a hell of a good time on Saturday night, and still afford my rent, gas, and groceries.

normally you might get by with fucking with me but never my family. I feel so helpless and ashamed.:hi:

Vietnam memorial...it would be like the old days, on active duty...except without shelter!

Ava makes me proud in the fact that I have two draft aged sons and they have lots of friends who are my friends also and they are all seeing things as the way they really are. If I was running for the President of the United States she would be the first person I would want to hire and she would be the best paid too. The girl is that good. Go Ava

gas prices, if nothing else, have really diminished the buying power of the average American.

Oh yeah -- health insurance too. Which is also going up.

it's easily in the double digits maybe the low teens.

Here is a simple theory of the current system of the world: the workers in the industrial wage slave nations are totally bamboozled. When they finally wake up, in a matrix like moment of revelation, there will be a shit storm of incredible proportions.

We have enormous price drops in things like MP3 players and computer games, but prices for essential services like health care and education are going bonkers.

The net of these two may not look like a bad inflation rate, but whe we can't afford essential services, having cheap toys is little consolation.

Hell, I couldn't even get close enough to google it.

By the time people "wake up", they'll probably already be living in work camps, or forced to be in the military, killing off others of the same stature in the global society as themselves. I think basically the shitstorm has started, but it's all us little people that are getting shit on. Especially if you live in Baghdad.

My pessimistic view is that the shitstorm will fly in a fundy theofascist direction out of A Handmaiden's Tale. I am not saying it will be a good thing at all.

please report in and comment! (GAC is the bomb when it comes to translating econ.data into laymans terms).

My view is that it's a bit over 10% annualized. I have another post here on this thread where i cover the impact of direct energy, especially on the people living at or below the median household income.

I don't have any data on property tax values, and the impact on inflation of housing costs, so i can't comment on that. Mine haven't bumped up too much, even though we passed a school referendum. So, it doesn't effect inflation in our locale that much, but i sure can't extrapolate that to the rest of the country!

The single biggest effect has been direct energy, and of course, the subsequent effect of energy (production, processing, transportation, retail operations) on food. Since neither food nor energy is included in the reported inflation rate, that upward price pressure due to energy is underreported to a substantial degree. And, this is TRUE inflation since people get no more in goods or services for the extra money. It's not just no greater volume, but there is no added value for that extra money. It's inflation in its purest form.

I think housing cost is overstated to some degree, because nobody HAS to buy a new house. So, the impact of the increase in housing (talking strictly home ownership, not rent) is voluntary and leveraged on debt. That has a skewed effect on overall inflation, because it generally means the funds are there to buy as much as before, so the effect of this is more on economic growth than on inflation. Not that it has no effect, but except for renters, and the property tax thing i admit i don't have enough information on, i think it a far weaker leverage point on inflation.

If you see that other post, you'll see that direct energy costs alone add about 2.5% to the inflation number for people living at the median.

And, to repeat just because i think it's important:

The inflation rate as reported is an absolute measure of price inflation of a specific good or service. However, the country doesn't live at the MEAN income. It lives at the MEDIAN income. So, the impact is far greater than a simple number would suggest. And, the lower one's income, the more inflation hurts. This is why the gov't borrowing needs to get under control and tax rates need to be bumped up to redistribute the income laterally instead of just vertically (up).

Let's all remember; ALL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS ARE MERELY A REDISTRIBUTION OF INCOME! This includes capitalism.
The Professor

People need to see the numbers, everyone can see that they're hurting it doesn't take a genius to understand that if you run out of gas on the way to work, even after scimping on lunchs, that something isn't right.

Think about it: the government only recently has excluded fuel and food in it's calculations for inflation, during Carter's time it included it, I believe. If I'm wrong, please correct me, but I think if we were to make those calculations, the numbers would be a whole lot closer.

I know it was pretty high when he came into office,I'll look and see if I can find it. I found 9% in 1975, after that I don't know.

Well, OK, there is all that monthly payment of debt interest....

That's a funny line!
The Professor

I meant to say that with real estate prices rising at 30% or more a year since Bush took office till last year, at least for new home buyers, whose mortgages generally run about 30% of average budget, that means 9% inflation right there, huh? Plus fuel tripling over the last few years, meat seems to have doubled, I can't afford romaine anymore, based on these random anecdotal guesstimates, I am sure its over 10% per year every year since Bush took ofice and some years a bit higher.

Think about this:
If someone is living at the median income (and for example we'll say $50k) and they drive two cars for a total of 25,000 miles at 25mpg, they went from spending $2400 on gas, to $2800 in one year. That's 0.8% of pre-tax income! Now add in the tax rate, add in electricity and natural gas, and we could easily tack 2.5 - 3% onto that 4.7%. That's already well over 7%. And, we haven't even considered food.

So, you're 10% is probably not too bad.

In addition, one thing i think people should keep in mind is that inflation reports as based upon absolute numbers. But, inflation is a relative thing. It affects people, on a percentage basis, much more greatly the lower their income. So, the 4.7% doesn't really reflect what happens to someone who's working poor.
The Professor

numbers even more onerous.

Since BushCo came in, we've seen close to a 40 percent increase. I'm sure others are seeing similar numbers as well....

...it is in the 8 to 10% range once the "adjustments" such as hedonic pricing are removed. The inflation rate has become increasingly murky since the early 60's when government statistics began to be serously "massaged" by those in power.

in TRIPLE digits over a few years.. That's a hard fact to hide under piles of mp-3s, and DVD players..

The solution is to LOOK at LIFESTYLES, and compare them..

30 years ago a SINGLE income supported a whole family...made the housepayment, car payment, enables a family to buy groceries, send kids to college, take vacations, go to doctors...and even feed savings accounts..

When those savings & loans were ripe for the picking by Neil Bush & CO, it was because they had MONEY..just sitting there..That money came from the SAVINGS that people used to have,. This was pre-401-k, IRAs, and a wild-crazy stock market.

ONE INCOME per family did all this... It wasn;t really until the late 70's early 80's that things started to go nuts, and all of a sudden (within 10 years or so) that a family NEEDED 2 incomes just to get by, and all the "goodies" they had before, just vanished for lots of folks.. In their places we got cheap electronic crap and bigger , but poorly contructed houses.. The flipside is that with everyone working at warp speed to afford these things, lots of people had no TIME to spend in those houses, playing with their electronic crap...and the kiddies ended up being raised by daycare-strangers who grabbed 1/4 of Mom's income..:shrug: