Unless and until the experts put their imprimatur on the escalation of consumer prices, realities are ignored.

Regular hardworking Americans could have told these experts many, many months ago that prices were increasing while their stagnant wages weren't keeping up with the rises.  They could have accompanied these Americans to the supermarket, or buying shoes for their children and discovered very quickly that typical Americans were being squeezed between a rock and a hard place.

From the NYTimes: "Almost everything that consumers spent money on last month — from food to electricity and gasoline — took a bigger piece of their paycheck.

"Inflation in June rose at the fastest rate in 17 years, the government said on Wednesday, just a day after the chairman of the Federal Reserve warned that inflation poses a significant risk to the nation’s economic outlook.

"The Consumer Price Index, which measures prices of a batch of common household products, rose 1.1 percent in June, the Labor Department said. That increases caps a year where inflation has surged to proportions seen by some as threatening the stability of the American economy. In the last 12 months, the price index has risen 5 percent, the biggest annual jump since May 1991.

"The report reinforces what many economists, including those at the Fed, have warned about for months: Americans are being forced to pay significantly higher prices even as the job market weakens and big employers like General Motors are laying off thousands of employees.

“ 'There’s not enough lipstick to put on this pig,' Richard Moody, an economist at Mission Residential, wrote in a note to clients. 'No matter how one slices and dices,' he added, 'the bottom line is that U.S. workers are falling farther and farther behind.' "

Unfortunately, some of these regular Americans voted for the idiot in the White House who helped place them in their struggling situation by promoting offshoring of jobs, regressive energy and environmental policies, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, staggering defense spending, deregulation or no regulation of greedy corporate crony mortgage lenders that brought about this economic catastrophe.

But, Dubya had time this week to veto the Medicare bill (because it assisted traditional Meidcare by decreasing the government payouts to his friends in the private Medicare Advantage program that are feeding at the federal trough) which was overridden by Congress. 

Meanwhile, his smirking, snikering performance at an "economic" press conference showed the man to be an idiot and brought no answers to the economic disaster caused by him and his hands off profit making by corporations any means, even criminal, administration.

And impeachment is still off the table.