Now we're getting somewhere, because “different households experience different rates of inflation” is a perfectly legitimate argument.
In fact, the BLS says exactly that. Someone who spends disproportionately on housing, medical care, groceries, insurance, etc. can experience a very different personal inflation rate than the national CPI.
What I objected to was calling the national average “contrived” and then using individual products to replace it.
An average isn't bogus merely because individual observations differ from it. That's literally why averages exist.
Your coffee example is perfectly valid as an example of coffee getting dramatically more expensive for you. If the same quantity and quality genuinely went from $5 to $20, that's a 300% price increase.
But it still doesn't establish 300% inflation.
My homeowners insurance, a graphics card, your coffee and somebody else's rent can all increase at wildly different rates simultaneously. That's why CPI tracks hundreds of categories and weights them according to consumer spending instead of having economists walk into a supermarket and yell, “Holy crap, Folgers is $20!”
Where you really lose me is this...300,000 jobs created minus 294,000 unemployment claims = 6,000 jobs.
Those statistics cannot be subtracted from one another.
Payroll employment measures the net monthly change in payroll jobs. Initial unemployment claims are weekly applications for unemployment benefits after a job separation, and they don't even represent every unemployed person. The BLS explicitly warns that unemployment insurance claims cannot be used as a complete measure of unemployment.
Someone can file an unemployment claim Monday and start another job Friday. Companies can eliminate 250,000 jobs while other companies create 550,000 and payroll employment still rises 300,000. The gains and losses are already occurring inside the labor market measurement.
So subtracting unemployment claims from payroll growth is basically subtracting apples from transmissions because both happened during the same month.
And I'll even give you the Trump point.
He received 49.80% of the popular vote in 2024, versus Harris at 48.32%. Calling that a “tremendous popular vote landslide” would be political hyperbole, not mathematics. He did win the Electoral College decisively, 312 to 226, but those are two different statements.
See how that works? I don't have to massage statistics to defend Trump, Biden, Democrats, Republicans or anyone else. If a claim is wrong, it's wrong regardless of whose name is attached to it.
As for your teaser ... where does supply and demand end and price gouging begin?
There isn't some magical economic percentage where one transforms into the other.
A shortage can legitimately make prices rise because supply fell relative to demand. Price gouging is generally a legal or normative question, often defined by state laws during emergencies. And if competing companies actually coordinate prices, that's something different again...price fixing, which is illegal.
So yes, personal inflation is real.
Yes, lower income households can be hurt disproportionately.
Yes, certain products have gone up far more than CPI.
Yes, politicians cherry pick statistics.
But none of that makes the CPI “fantasy.”
And frankly, if we've gone from “the dollar lost 75% of its value” to “my personal basket of goods rose faster than average,” then we've made considerable progress.
That's the argument I was making in the first place.
