America's Talking - Inflation Rose the Most in These States, Data Shows

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Newly released inflation data breaks down how much prices have increased in each state. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released new data Wednesday for how the Personal Consumption Expenditure, a key marker of inflation, rose in each state last year. According to the BEA, PCE is a measure of the prices Americans pay for goods and services. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today as he does each and every week is the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Arbor. How are you, Casey? Doing good, Dan. How are you? Doing well. End of another long week covering the federal government. That's right. In Washington, D.C. inflation. It continues to be a major concern for Americans across the country with increased price. at the gas pump, the grocery store, and housing, and nearly all other sectors of the economy, forcing families to make tough decisions regarding spending. Well, a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released this week breaks down just how much of an impact of inflation is having across the states. You wrote about that report, KC. at thecentersquare.com. Tell us about it.

Yeah, that's right. I'll just say if anyone listening, your boss offers you that your paycheck goes up when inflation goes up, but down when it goes down, you should take that deal. Because inflation had, you would have got over a 15% raise in the last couple of years, and inflation hasn't gone down in a long time. But the state, the state breakdown was extremely interesting. As you said, the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases data, finally coming out about, you know, how inflation increased in 2022. We can talk a little bit more about what's happening this year because I do think it's

very interesting. You look at all 50 states, you know, here's a big one, 11 percent, 11.8 percent in Idaho increase, which is extremely high. No one is getting it, I mean, almost no one is getting a 11 percent, 12 percent raise, right, across one year's time. Most people. And just to clarify, this is year over year data, right? This is 2021 to 2022. Correct.

This is a one-year percentage change. So 11.8 percent change. I mean, you know, maybe. if you got to raise it all, maybe it was 5%, 2%, something like that. But there's no way you're keeping up with that inflation. And I think actually the, so the lowest increase was in Louisiana, which is a 6.4% increase, which is just crazy that that's the lowest increase because that's still very high. You know, most economists say a healthy inflation rate would be something like 2%.

Right. Now, you can have a kind of philosophical argument about if inflation. So the lowest you're saying was Louisiana at 6.4%, which is still 3%. times higher than what the normal or what economists say should be healthy inflation. That's right. It's right. So this is just in one year. This is across all goods, but some goods that Americans use every day were much more expensive.

Grocery prices, for instance, saw a much bigger change than all this. There's some things that, you know, a big driver this also was shelter. Dan, you know, whether you're renting or buying, though that was a big cause of the increase in a lot of states. So don't worry about it. As long as you're not eating or need a place to live, you'll be just fine, Dan. I think that's what you call sarcasm, Casey. Sometimes I've had a hard time telling with you.

Let's just briefly go through a couple of the states. For our listeners, if you search Casey's story this week on the centersquare. on inflation, there's a map that we use that shows specific numbers for each of the states, and it's a color-coded map, and the deep, dark blue shows the states that had the highest inflation year over year from 21, 20 to 22. And what I found interesting or odd was a lot of Mountain West states were among the highest in the country. You referenced Idaho being highest in the country at 11.8%.

then you have Utah at 11.3, Colorado at 10.2, Montana at 9.7, Nevada at 11.4. There were some other states out east, Florida, Georgia, in the Midwest, Indiana, that had that dark blue cover of inflation over 9.7%. But it is somewhat interesting to me to just look at the differentiations. Now, again, as we said, the lowest increase in inflation was Louisiana at 6.4%. So that's still extremely. extremely high. But the nines, the tens, the 11%, aren't isolated pockets of the country. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely trends. I think, you know, it would be easy to ask the question, like, well, why is, you know, Nevada or Utah higher Arizona? And there, of course, are reasons. I think you have to, there's a lot of complex economic factors that could be affecting it that aren't necessarily political. I think the overall trend of this inflation definitely is political, because the federal debt spending leads to more money printing, and the money supply has exploded in recent years, and because of that, you know, it was justified by COVID and different things,

but the money supply has exploded, and that's one of the biggest causes for inflation. They tried to say for a long time that all the inflation was just because of the supply chain because of like COVID and the Ukraine war, but that just didn't hold up. I mean, it definitely impacted it for a while, but there's no, there's not real supply chain from COVID issues anymore. So, you know, I think there's housing market changes. A lot of people, for instance, are leaving some of these expensive, you know, cities and they're moving to places like the West, like Texas, like Florida and significantly increasing, for instance, home prices. Not to say that that's the primary reason or anything, but it's just one of the many things

that can lead to slight variations between states. So we can't read too much into it, but it's definitely interesting and regardless of where you live, you saw a huge increase in your cost of living and your wages. We know from the data that wages did not keep up. Casey, Geography 101 lesson. Florida is not out west. It's in the southeast. And with that, with that dig, Casey, I'm going to wrap us up because we're out of it. Thank you. Of course, listeners can keep up with Casey's and the entire Center Square reporting staff's coverage of the inflation issue at the center store at stair square.com. I can't speak the center square.com. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McCaleb. Please subscribe and thanks for listening.