Food hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for decades. Better manufacturing and logistics has made food super cheap. Housing and healthcare are much larger expenditures and are largely underrepresented by USA's CPI.
Food being largely "super cheap" is exactly why it's a good indicator of inflation, as it applies to actual peoples' lives. Milk, cheese, oats, eggs, butter, bread, are things that people need for themselves and for their children. When these things go up in price, that's real inflation. Not metropolitan wankers pushing paper and courting similar paper-pushing wankers from abroad.
On the contrary, agriculture is a tiny portion of our nation's economy. For quite a while, food was practically an afterthought. Buying 2 cars and feeding a family of 5 on the salary that could be had with a high school diploma was the norm at one point. You don't have all of these things because you're worried about the cost of food. People don't get grotesquely obese if calories are expensive.
Food prices are becoming relevant again because of rampant and massive theft by the upper class. It has little to do with the actual effort required to produce food.
On the contrary, real, actual people who need to eat are far less concerned with what you're calling "the economy," which is people at desks typing numbers into computers, and are far more concerned with putting nutritious calories into the mouths of their children. These people are concerned with the cost of food, which makes a 40% increase in the cost of eggs and butter of far more importance to them than whatever piece of shared hallucination pretend paper slash computer money that is your primary concern.
Now if you want to get egghead about it, the real concern behind increasing food costs is why the prices of these goods are increasing; and there you have the actual economy. Energy, fertilizer, transportation, water, waste, feed, fuel, machinery, maintenance, parts and labor, are all included in the resultant price of food. A double-digit increase in the cost of a gallon of milk, a rasher of bacon, or a dozen eggs, indicates in a very important and easily-observable way that vital gears in "the economy" have gone intensely fucky and we should probably find out why and fix it.
We are not talking about an extra quarter for Little Debbie star pies or whatever. We are talking about the baseline stuff here that everyone needs. If you want to laser focus your attention on mercurial real estate prices or bond markets or whatever, that's your prerogative, but it isn't the least bit useful for people trying to navigate the times. You will not consider food "an afterthought" when you can't get it anymore.
You've been so thoroughly robbed that you would consider having food in your belly to be enough. And that's exactly why we'll never have the golden age of the 60s ever again. Technology gives us far more wealth than just food and shelter, but most of it goes to our overlords.
Housing hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for ages, it's in a bubble and chinese investment chasing a safe foreign deposit and entire country's economies (aus) dependent on it, and ludicrous regulation, has driven the housing price up well beyond inflation, but with the bubble now peaking and rates going up we're about to see it pop like in 2008.
Food hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for decades. Better manufacturing and logistics has made food super cheap. Housing and healthcare are much larger expenditures and are largely underrepresented by USA's CPI.
Food being largely "super cheap" is exactly why it's a good indicator of inflation, as it applies to actual peoples' lives. Milk, cheese, oats, eggs, butter, bread, are things that people need for themselves and for their children. When these things go up in price, that's real inflation. Not metropolitan wankers pushing paper and courting similar paper-pushing wankers from abroad.
On the contrary, agriculture is a tiny portion of our nation's economy. For quite a while, food was practically an afterthought. Buying 2 cars and feeding a family of 5 on the salary that could be had with a high school diploma was the norm at one point. You don't have all of these things because you're worried about the cost of food. People don't get grotesquely obese if calories are expensive.
Food prices are becoming relevant again because of rampant and massive theft by the upper class. It has little to do with the actual effort required to produce food.
On the contrary, real, actual people who need to eat are far less concerned with what you're calling "the economy," which is people at desks typing numbers into computers, and are far more concerned with putting nutritious calories into the mouths of their children. These people are concerned with the cost of food, which makes a 40% increase in the cost of eggs and butter of far more importance to them than whatever piece of shared hallucination pretend paper slash computer money that is your primary concern.
Now if you want to get egghead about it, the real concern behind increasing food costs is why the prices of these goods are increasing; and there you have the actual economy. Energy, fertilizer, transportation, water, waste, feed, fuel, machinery, maintenance, parts and labor, are all included in the resultant price of food. A double-digit increase in the cost of a gallon of milk, a rasher of bacon, or a dozen eggs, indicates in a very important and easily-observable way that vital gears in "the economy" have gone intensely fucky and we should probably find out why and fix it.
We are not talking about an extra quarter for Little Debbie star pies or whatever. We are talking about the baseline stuff here that everyone needs. If you want to laser focus your attention on mercurial real estate prices or bond markets or whatever, that's your prerogative, but it isn't the least bit useful for people trying to navigate the times. You will not consider food "an afterthought" when you can't get it anymore.
You've been so thoroughly robbed that you would consider having food in your belly to be enough. And that's exactly why we'll never have the golden age of the 60s ever again. Technology gives us far more wealth than just food and shelter, but most of it goes to our overlords.
Housing hasn't been a good indicator of inflation for ages, it's in a bubble and chinese investment chasing a safe foreign deposit and entire country's economies (aus) dependent on it, and ludicrous regulation, has driven the housing price up well beyond inflation, but with the bubble now peaking and rates going up we're about to see it pop like in 2008.