{"id":196208,"date":"2008-05-16T05:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-16T10:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/16\/more-on-the-inanity-of-us-inflation-statistics\/"},"modified":"2008-05-16T05:07:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-16T10:07:00","slug":"more-on-the-inanity-of-us-inflation-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/16\/more-on-the-inanity-of-us-inflation-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"More on the Inanity of US Inflation Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Barry Ritholtz notes that in addition to all the various hedonic ajustments, the CPI says that the <a href=\"http:\/\/bigpicture.typepad.com\/comments\/2008\/05\/inflation-ex-in.html\">average US consumer spends only 7.66% of income on food<\/a>, as opposed to the numbers of 10% for the UK, 15% for the rest of Europe, and 18% for Japan, which is patently absurd.<\/p>\n<p>Ritholtz states that the 4 bottom quintiles spend closer to 20%, which sounds about right.<\/p>\n<p>According to Wiki, the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Household_income_in_the_United_States\">median family income in the US in 2006<\/a> was 48,201.00, so let&#8217;s round to 50K.<\/p>\n<p>8% of 50K would be $4,000, 20% of 50K would be $10,000.  Assuming 3 meals a day and a 4 menber family over 50 weeks, we get $0.95 and $2.38 per meal respectively.  The former is living exclusively on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.<\/p>\n<p>The fact is that when things like snacks, fresh vegetables, etc. are factored in, the per food cost probably gets closer to $5.00\/meal for total food cost for a family of 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Barry Ritholtz notes that in addition to all the various hedonic ajustments, the CPI says that the average US consumer spends only 7.66% of income on food, as opposed to the numbers of 10% for the UK, 15% for the rest of Europe, and 18% for Japan, which is patently absurd. Ritholtz states that the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1200,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inflation","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196208"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}