On the North River

Howie Carr: Biden inflation a pain at the pump, grocery store

And by the way, in case you haven’t left the house recently, you may not have noticed that the government’s official 7.5% inflation rate (the highest since 1982) is nonsense.

How can you have a list of “core” prices that does not include food and fuel? Food and fuel are two necessities that you need to survive — you can’t get any more “core” than food and fuel.

I found a website where a statistician uses the pre-1980 methods of computing inflation. It’s called shadowstats.com. He pegged last month’s actual inflation rate, which includes food and fuel prices, at 15.63%, the highest since June 1947.

My contractor was over yesterday with the new window for the garage he ordered for me three months ago. Three months. And it’s for an unheated garage, any window would have done.

So I asked him to guesstimate what the porch rebuild that he finished just before Trump left office would cost to do today and he said an easy 60% more or about $33-34K (I paid $21K).
If he could get the material and he’d probably be waiting a year to get all the material needed. The left over material in the garage that I was going to ask him to dump, is probably worth $3,000 to somebody today.

He’s trying to keep his labor rates down so he doesn’t completely price himself out of his remaining jobs. Not that anyone else could do it for less, but there is a price at which his customers will balk and cancel.