I'm not sure what it would add to the debate (see Wisconsin political facts, Wisconsin Watch).
this JEC – Republican National Inflation Tracker :
Quantifies the costs of inflation faced by U.S. households in the high-inflation environment that began in early 2021.
When I first learned about this resource, I thought, “Great! – someone took the trouble to calculate state-specific inflation rates.” Once one reads the document, one sees that the final calculation yields a combination of household size and inflation effects, where “household size” has to be estimated at the sub-regional level and prices have to be estimated at the sub-regional level. In fact, the resulting index is not unique to Wisconsin.
The following is the algorithm described by JEC-Republicans:
Estimating the cost of inflation to the average household in each state involves three main steps: (1) estimating average monthly household expenditures in each state, (2) estimating the inflation rate in each state (both relative to January 2021), and (3 ) applies inflation rates to monthly household expenditures to estimate state-level inflation costs. For each state, we estimate overall monthly household inflation costs as well as inflation costs in four spending categories: food, housing, transportation, and energy.
The main problem I see is that in order to calculate “household costs” they have to convert BLS consumer spending and PCE spending and consumer units to households. Rates are broken down by census tract. CPI by BLS region. Some of these translations could be avoided by simply calculating per capita and using BLS weights. For Wisconsin, the “cost of inflation for 'households'” is very close to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) through March 2024, keeping in mind that the so-called Wisconsin index is not really specific to Wisconsin. (As far as I know, they are using 2019 consumer unit enumerations.)
figure 1: Central Northeast CPI, nsa (black), JEC-Republican estimated cost of inflation per consumer unit in Wisconsin (red), all recorded in 2021M01 log = 0. Source: BLS, JEC-Republicans, and author's calculations.
In my opinion, it would be simpler to just take the BLS subregional CPI series and multiply by household size. Note that weighting CPI spending to PCE spending pushes up the dollar amount per household relative to using BLS CPI (which may be the goal).
In the methodology note, JEC-Rep does not directly provide expenditures for the food, housing, transportation subcategories, so I cannot compare their measure of household inflation costs with the BLS Subregional Inflation Index.
