What most consumers obsess about is gasoline. Price goes up, price goes down, and it hits consumers directly in disposable income. That’s pretty easy to measure.
What most economists and policy makers should be obsessing about is the price of diesel fuel (or, more accurately, distillate), which hits consumers in the price of everything that has to be shipped — coal to power plants, food to stores, food being harvested, finished goods to/from ports, jet travel, bus travel, you name it.
The fact is that we get only about half as much diesel in cracking a barrel of oil as we do gasoline also blazes by most consumers (the “3-2-1 crack” of crude).
And as a farmer, lemme tell you that five years ago, I used to buy non-taxed (ie “off-road”) diesel for about $0.70/gal.
Today, if I wanted to get a load of diesel, it would cost me about $3.10/gal - without taxes. That makes the price of my goods (hay) go up, which is making the price of milk go up and in between here and there, the cost of trucking hay to dairies and milk from the dairies to the fluid plant and from the fluid plant to your store has gone up, up, up — all due to diesel fuel.
That’s inflation, and it is stupidity on the part of policy makers to not measure it, because consumers *are* seeing it in the end.
OK, so you want to take an inflation measure that isn’t perfect and reduce it to an inflation measure that’s useless because it bounces up or down 20% every month.
Thanks for your opinion.