Yes, if you get to pick prices of arbitrary items to compare against, it's easy to come to whatever conclusion you want[1]. That's why CPI uses a basket of goods, specifically to avoid cherry picking shenanigans.
[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cpi2022junea-...
Right, because it's not "essentials price index" or whatever.
>as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.
The BLS makes the constituent price indices available as well as their weights, so you can easily vibecode an "essentials" index.
The BLS agrees. That's why "shelter" is weighted 35.6% in the CPI basket, by far the biggest item.
> I couldn't care less about all the other categories, personally.
If we're going by what people "care" about (whatever that means), the basket would probably be like 70% gas prices, 20% grocery prices, and 10% for everything else. Empirically speaking, those two are far more salient politically than housing.
If you want to understand something else, use the measures and data that are focused on that something else. Right tool for the job and all that.
Careful.
Much of the western world has healthcare that is free at the point of use and paid for by taxation; one cannot extrapolate consumer inflationary healthcare costs in quite the manner the USA does.
[1] Mostly thanks to computers/software making housing a more compelling proposition. Historically, people couldn't wait to get outside or over to the pub and would allocate their spending to support that, but now that they prefer to stay in to look at screens, they deem that place where they spend time worthy of greater spending instead.
