The learned Emeritus Profess (Roanoke College) Robert Stauffer, in his Sunday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section objects to the inclusion of “owner equivalent rent” (OER) in standard inflation measures on the grounds that “real” inflation is much lower than it’s represented to be, and this exclusion would make the measures more reasonable. (Oh, and no one pays that rent anyway.)

Stauffer’s beef is irrelevant.

Stauffer worries about OER, but he studiously ignores energy and food, whose inflation numbers are excised from those standard measures to leave so-called core inflation on the rationalization that food and energy pricing is so volatile.

However, real consumers, us ordinary Americans, pay actual dollars for that food and energy, and the prices we pay keep on going up, however variably from time to time, and those price increases, smoothed over a few periods, remain higher than “core” inflation, and especially so regarding Stauffer’s “corrected” inflation.