Gas prices HAVE gone down, but grocery prices are way up. And I’ll bet Americans spend a lot more on groceries than gas. And, of course, rents & property taxes continue to increase.
The main thing I see is the price of groceries going up. Gas is down and in our area property taxes are down and just went down again. The price of real estate is cheap.
I think we are in a deflationary cycle. With 7 years of stimulous stimulous stimulous, print, print, print we should be in hyper inflation by now. We are not.
If they raise rates watch the stock market tank. Then they will have to lower again. I’ll be shocked if the Fed actually does it.
And we know that gas will go back up, nature of the product. We also know grocery prices will not go down.
My property taxes go up nearly every year. I'm betting that they don't figure into the CPI. We have an unelected "library board" that raises our property taxes for the country library system EVERY year (always for the children!) and we are not allowed to have a public hearing on that unless they want to increase over about 25%. One year I raised hell in the local paper & legally demanded a public hearing when they were going up 25%. They promptly dropped the increase to 24% and cancelled the hearing. FU taxpayer.
Kentucky has a weird law that allows local unelected taxing authorities to raise taxes a lot without any hearing or say so by the public. It's called "the compensating rate". They can raise the tax rate to any % necessary to get up to 4% *more revenue* than taken in the previous year. So when the tax base shrank because of the economy, that meant a 24% rate increase for those remaining taxpayers in order to get the country their 4% increase in total revenue. IOW, our local rulers are guaranteed by the state to get at least 4% more total revenue every year regardless of how bad things are for we the taxpayer. Talk about entitlement!