From the Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin:
In the last four years, Biden’s reckless spending has driven the national debt past $34 trillion – more than $258,000 of debt per household – and Americans’ purchasing power has declined as families have seen the prices of goods and services rise much faster than their income. Prices are now 17.9% higher and the average household is paying over $11,400 more each year just to maintain the same quality of life as when Biden took office.
While the statement mentions the higher costs (given that prices have risen worldwide, it’s not clear to me how attributable higher prices are to Biden), it doesn’t mention how salaries and wages have risen. To answer this question, I use the East North Central CPI, seasonally adjusted using X-13, to deflate to 2017M12 dollars the total wages and salaries for Wisconsin. I deflate to per capita terms (thereby circumventing the byzantine calculation of “household” amounts) to obtain Figure 1.
Figure 1: Wisconsin total wages and salaries deflated to 2017M12$ using regional CPI seasonally adjusted by author using X-13, and divided by Wisconsin population (blue), and 3 quarter centered moving average (red). Note annual population for July interpolated to quarterly using cubic interpolation. Source: BEA, BLS, Census via FRED, and author’s calculations.
Note that in 2023Q3, per capita real income is 2.5% higher than it was in 2021Q1.
Other Americans for Prosperity analyses, examined here and here.
Here’s a picture of some other countries’ core inflation rates:
Figure 2: US core CPI inflation (blue), Euro area 20 core HICP inflation (tan), UK CPI inflation (green), all year-on-year. NBER defined US recession dates, peak-to-trough. Source: BLS, European Commission, ONS, via FRED, NBER, and author’s calculations.
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