COMMON MAN CPI
August 14, 2024
The primary justification for excluding food and energy from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “core” CPI number is that the data are noisy and therefore difficult for economists to forecast. Naturally, that brings up another question, do the data exist for economists and policymakers to make their decisions or do they exist for regular people when deciding how to run their economic lives? Excluding food, energy, and housing from the “supercore” measure seems a little much because, let’s face it, eating, staying warm, and protecting oneself from hypothermia seem pretty “supercore” for the average person. I would last about 10 minutes in the wild. In any event, we created our Common Man CPI to focus on items that people must buy regularly – food, energy, shelter, clothing, utilities, and insurance. We exclude anything we would deem to be discretionary, from flat panel television screens to flights to Fort Lauderdale. The Common Man CPI exceeded the headline number in 37 of the 42 months of the Biden Administration.
The primary justification for excluding food and energy from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “core” CPI number is that the data are noisy and therefore difficult for economists to forecast. Naturally, that brings up another question, do the data exist for economists and policymakers to make their decisions or do they exist for regular people when deciding how to run their economic lives? Excluding food, energy, and housing from the “supercore” measure seems a little much because, let’s face it, eating, staying warm, and protecting oneself from hypothermia seem pretty “supercore” for the average person. I would last about 10 minutes in the wild. In any event, we created our Common Man CPI to focus on items that people must buy regularly – food, energy, shelter, clothing, utilities, and insurance. We exclude anything we would deem to be discretionary, from flat panel television screens to flights to Fort Lauderdale. The Common Man CPI exceeded the headline number in 37 of the 42 months of the Biden Administration.