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CBO: Explaining the Consumer Price Index

CBO A series of issue summaries from the Congressional Budget Office, June 20, 2007 – Explaining the Consumer Price Index

  • “The consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) is the best-known official measure of inflation. Published monthly by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the CPI-U tries to approximate changes in the cost of living—that is, changes in the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living from one month to the next. To construct the CPI-U, BLS surveys the prices of thousands of goods and services (the index has more than 200 categories of items) in 38 regions, averaging the results to form a nationwide estimate of inflation. Over the past five years, the cost of living, as measured by the CPI-U, has varied but, on average, has risen by about 2-3/4 percent per year.”
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