Why Inflation in Phoenix is Higher Than in New York

A year ago, President Joe Biden said that inflation was supposed to be temporary, but costs for most Americans are still increasing. According to Jared Bernstein of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, inflation is Biden's "top priority" and it's "unacceptably high."

But while policymakers try to tackle inflation, it's worth noting what inflation is and what it is not.

Inflation is not one number

Headlines regarding inflation may include a figure - currently 9.1 percent over the past 12 months. But that figure is a composite of lots of prices of other things: food, energy, services. What Americans experience as "inflation" depends on what they are spending their money on.

Some items, such as food, rent and energy costs, are unavoidable. And these are far higher than the headline figure. Food at home (i.e. not eating out) is at an inflation rate of 12.2 percent. Energy is at 41.6 percent.

Inflation isn't the same everywhere

Again, the headline figure of 9.1 percent doesn't tell the full story. Inflation feels a lot worse if you are in Phoenix right now rather than San Francisco or New York. The Phoenix metro area has inflation at 12.3 percent, the highest in the continental U.S.

New York and San Francisco may be opposite ends of the country, but they have a similar rate of inflation: 6.7 and 6.8 percent respectively.

Why is Phoenix's inflation so high?

In terms of the components, Phoenix is close to the national rate of inflation for food - 9.3 percent to 10.4 nationally - and energy (43.3 percent vs. 41.6 nationally).

Rather, it's everything else. For Phoenix, the category "All items less food and energy" is 10.2 percent higher than June last year, compared to 5.9 percent nationally. New York, for comparison, registered just 4.1 percent for that category in June.

So while Phoenix residents are paying higher costs for energy and food, like all Americans, their spending on everything else is also higher than the headline figure of inflation. For context, the CPI figure gives a weighting of 7 percent to energy, and 13 percent to food, so everything else is around 80 percent.

To give a sense of the regional variations in inflation, Newsweek has put together the following dashboard. All data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and will be updated on a monthly basis.