In Case You Missed this

CNBC published a short article on the alternative CPI - the graph is presented here.  The standard CPI excludes some elements like food and energy because of their inherent volatility.  That may make sense in some economic calculations but it does not for figuring out, paraphrasing President Reagan, about one of the last times individuals could see their everyday expenses ballooning "Are you better off now than you were" before the 2008 election.

This chained CPI, which does include those elements hit a record.   When you look at government policies like support for ethanol, excluding things like corn from the regular CPI does not make sense.  CNBC suggests that the government should do some smoothing but should publish both numbers more widely.  That makes sense but the more important point is that government statistics are creations (not that they are intentionally fudged) and you need to know the underlying things that go into them to understand whether the numbers that many of us rely on actually mean what their interpreters say they do.   In the case of the CPI, we need both.  In the case of unemployment numbers, in addition to the numbers on who took out claims we need to know who is no longer looking for a job and who is underemployed (a very hard number to discover).