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"Housing costs" as defined in that link would be housing costs for someone becoming a homeowner for the first time. I agree that it's rough if you're a first-time homeowner but that's a pretty small slice of the population. Most people already have homes (so house price increases are good) and have fixed rate mortgages (so rate increases are irrelevant).
The rent chart you showed has rental prices increasing at about a 6-7% annual rate, which I agree is annoyingly high but doesn't seem catastrophic?
Staple foods are a pretty small share of people's consumption basket. (Food at home is about 4% of people's expenditures: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/)
Ultimately you're getting at something correct, but I don't think in the way you meant it to be. There's a huge disconnect between what people think the economy is (that people mostly consume lettuce and mayonnaise and half of the economy are coal miners) and what it actually is.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
For starters, even your own source says the total amount of "Food at home" is 6%, plus another 6% for "Food away from home", making "Total food" 12%. Three times higher. And yeah, 12% of your budget jumping between 50-100% over the course of a single presidency is a pretty serious strain on the average household.
Same thing goes for rent. We aren't just talking about the last year. We're talking about the entire era of "Bidenomics". Coming up on 4 years of "only 6-7% inflation" makes for over 25% inflation total. If it had just been 2% we'd be looking at 8% inflation. That statistica link I shared, which now expects me to become a member god damnit, showed average rent jumping from ~$1000 to over $1300. To say nothing of how highly regional rent can be. In my area I had a buddy's rent jump up 25% in one year when he renewed.
If you own you aren't out of the woods yet. God help you if you have to move. If your family grows. If you divorce. If you need to move for work. It's no fun knowing if you have to move for any reason you can expect to pay 2x or more your current mortgage on a comparable home. You basically just got knocked off the housing wealth ladder completely.
This hasn't actually happened though. Yes, there are stories about the prices of specific food items suddenly jumping, but no one points the hundreds of things that didn't go up in price or that even fell, nor does anyone make note of when those prices don't jump.
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This number is simply wrong.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDNS
This is more accurate. However, two things to note. Firstly, your quarrel here is not with Joe Biden but American planning law. Secondly, I wonder what happens when we compare nominal wages to average nominal shelter prices - as you can see, they track together since Q1 2021, except for the past few quarters, in which admittedly shelter has outpaced wages. However, it's only one, admittedly large part of the basket, and this is urban rents which one imagines have risen faster than average. So all in all, not convinced.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAS2RS#0
This number is an exaggeration, but aside from that look at this graph. The increase is clearly well underway pre-Biden. This has nothing to do with Bidenomics. Once again, if you want to blame someone blame NIMBYs.
Edit; just realised I put the wrong graph in and I've lost the right one. But the rent one proves enough I think. Unless this is a statement about interest rate increases, in which case ok but 'I think the government is running too contractionary a monetary policy' is sort of directly at odds with 'I think inflation is too high and it's the government's fault'.
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Throw whatever food categories you want, the point is people spend a tiny amount of their income on food.
Yeah I mean landlords are famously slow and chunky while adjusting. Sorry that happened to a guy you know.
The point is people are out here talking like there’s some conspiracy to hide the fact that prices 100% higher than they used to be when in fact they aren’t and wages have increased along with the modest price increases.
All that aside, the following facts:
Really kind of gives away what’s happening, right?
12% is not, in fact, tiny.
CPI: Food was 271.271 in January 2021, it is 324.374 now, a 19.5% increase. It was 248.065 in January 2017, a 9.35% increase over the entire Trump presidency. All items CPI increase was 7.8% from January 2017 to January 2021; it is 17.1% over the January 2021 value now. Real disposable personal income was up 10.7% from January 2021 to February 2020 (at which point it goes nuts); it is up 5.2% since then. Real median household income, on the other hand, actually peaked in 2019 at $78,250 in 2022 dollars and dropped to $74,580 in 2022.
So no, prices aren't up 100% except in a few specific cases. But they're up a lot, and while real personal income has gone up, real household income has gone down.
You would have thought that, "besides, people don't really spend that much money on food, housing, and energy" was just dunking on dishonest economists, but alas...
To be fair the plurality of my spending is actually on taxes. But they want to raise those too.
The full CPI breakdown is here; it includes the weights. Food is weighted at 13.380%, which seems quite significant. Energy is 7.162%, which isn't nothing. Shelter is 34.749% which is large -- note that core inflation DOES include shelter, "supercore" is like "fetch", it's not happening. Flat screen TVs are 0.130%, so really don't figure much into it.
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Why are you so stuck on being wrong? 12% is not a tiny amount! It's trades for second or third place in spending categories behind housing and, often times, transportation.
The rhetorical dynamic is the following:
economists have thought really hard about how to measure inflation and have sophisticated data and tools to do it. They do their thing and say that year over year inflation is 4% or whatever.
weird zerohedge people notice that mayonnaise prices at target are higher by 75% and from this conclude that the federal reserve is lying about inflation.
I think people in #2 get confused because food is so important to live while flat screen tvs are not. So when food prices go up they think a lot of people must be about to starve. It’s useful to point out to these confused people that food, while necessary to live, is so cheap relative to Americans’ income that food prices can increase a lot and it doesn’t really matter. Hence headline inflation can be low even though mayonnaise at target seems expensive, and nevertheless headline inflation is the thing we should care about.
Not only do people not spend a very large portion of their incomes on food, but they spend an even tinier amount on mayonaise, and it isn't even necessary to live. My point being that people fixate on a few specific things whose prices have risen by a lot and ignore the many things whose prices have not risen by as much or at all.
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How is any of that a rebuttal to you being point of fact wrong about how much people spend on food, and how impactful food inflation is to them?
I mean sure, if 3% vs 12% is what changes your mind then fine, but this seems like totally missing the point. I can find some other small sliver of consumption where prices are down or flat. Most people are out there acting concerned as if food is 50% of people’s spending.
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