February consumer price inflation in the U.S. economy was officially announced by the Labor Department as 0.8%, and the year-to-year CPI inflation rose by another full percentage point to 7.9%. Real hourly wages appear now to be down 2.6% since February 2021, with the drop in real weekly wages not yet announced. American working people’s real wages have now fallen, year-on-year, for 11 consecutive months.
Substantial inflation is now seen in all categories of consumer spending, the highest being energy, non-energy commodities, food (which is up 8.6% in a year), and services such as transportation. The politically central average U.S. price for the lowest-cost grade of gasoline is at $4.33, highest on record. Rising but still far underreported is shelter inflation (up 4.7%), which the BLS bases on a purely guesswork survey of homeowners who do not rent their homes, rather than the objective data gathered by private firms which indicates shelter inflation at more than 15%. So even officially the inflation index should be at 10-11%, the level at the end of the 1970s “Great Inflation.”
