I’m undecided what it brings to the talk (see PolitiFact Wisconsin, WisconsinWatch).
The JEC-Republicans State Inflation Tracker :
quantifies the inflation prices that American households are dealing with within the excessive inflationary atmosphere that started in early 2021. We outline month-to-month inflation prices as the extra expenditures in a given month required for a family to achieve the identical lifestyle it achieved within the baseline month, January 2021.
Once I first was apprised of this useful resource, I believed “Nice! – Any person’s gone by way of the difficulty to determine a state-specific inflation charge”. As soon as one reads by way of the documentation, one sees that the ensuing calculations yield a mixture of family-size and inflation results, the place “household dimension” needs to be imputed from a subregional stage foundation, and costs should be imputed from a subregional foundation. Truly, the the ensuing index is just not Wisconsin-specific.
Right here’s the algorithm as described by JEC-Republicans:
Estimating inflation prices for the typical family in every state consists of three predominant steps: (1) estimating common month-to-month family spending by state, (2) approximating inflation charges by state, every relative to January 2021, and (3) making use of the inflation charges to month-to-month family spending to estimate state-level inflation prices. For every state, we estimate general month-to-month family inflation prices in addition to inflation prices inside 4 spending classes: meals, shelter, transportation, and power.
The primary drawback I see is that, in an effort to calculate a “family price”, they should translate from BLS client expenditure and PCE expenditures, and client models to households. Ratios are by Census area. CPIs are by BLS areas. A few of these translations may very well be prevented had they merely gone on a per capita foundation, and used BLS weights. For Wisconsin, the “inflation price for ‘family’” matches fairly carefully the CPI by March 2024, maintaining in thoughts the purported Wisconsin index is just not actually for Wisconsin. (So far as I can inform, they’re utilizing 2019 enumeration of client models.)
Determine 1: East North Central CPI, n.s.a. (black), JEC-Republican estimated Wisconsin inflation price per client unit (purple), each in logs 2021M01=0. Supply: BLS, JEC-Republicans, and creator’s calculations.
For my part, it could’ve been easier to only take the BLS subregional CPI collection, and multiplied by family dimension. Observe, adjusting CPI expenditures to PCE expenditure weights pushes up the greenback quantity per family, relative to utilizing BLS CPI, which could have been the target.
Within the methodology notes, JEC-Rep didn’t immediately present expenditures for subcategories meals, housing, transport, so I couldn’t examine their measure of family prices of inflation to the BLS subregional inflation index.
