"I Can't Eat an iPad" -- The Real State of the Economy

New York Fed President William Dudley recently bragged that our national economy is improving: “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he told a crowd in Queens. But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, one bystander pointed out, “I can’t eat an iPad.” Someone else asked Dudley, “When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?”

Prices are indeed going up on things we need. As an April 5 story in The Washington Post explained, “it’s not computers and cars that are getting more expensive, it’s gasoline, which is up 19 percent in the past year, ground beef, up 10 percent, and butter, up 23 percent.”

Yet these commodities don’t appear in the Federal Reserve’s formula for calculating inflation. So experts can point to statistics that say things are getting better, while drivers and shoppers perceive things are getting more difficult....

Rich Tucker's column on the American economy is an excellent one. Read it all right here.