Editor's note
This week on Who Gets What? we hear from Judy Sharp, the Assessor for Monroe County. You’ll find out how Indiana’s Legislature makes the jobs of all Indiana county assessors more difficult and confuses voters with arbitrary changes in the rules. Find it all at the Who Gets What? podcast, available at mortonjohn.libsyn.com.
Let’s take a look at some specific consumer prices. What we hear or read about are inflation data for the nation. But there is a vast amount of data for other geographies. Sadly, Indiana and Indianapolis are not blessed with data as are Cincinnati and Chicago. However, we do have data for the Midwest, that area from Cleveland to Kansas City.

If we look at March 2015 through March 2025, we find prices rising faster in the nation, 3.1% on average, than in the Midwest (2.9%). These are the average annual increases in consumer prices for the month of March.

The differences are small, and the Midwest advantage has not been sustained. The CPI (Consumer Price Index) for March 2022 had the highest springtime increase (year over year) in inflation in those ten years: 8.5% for the nation and 8.6% for the Midwest. By this year, the March increase was 2.4% for the nation and 2.7% for the Midwest.

These data are most encouraging. The important change is the decline in the rate of inflation, nationally and regionally. To lead or to trail the nation by small figures is inconsequential compared to the benefits of declining inflation which was manifest in ten critical sectors.

For the Midwest, the annual rate of inflation in each of these ten categories declined from highs in March 2022 to March 2025: Apparel fell from 4.3% to 1.8%, Food at home down from 11.3% to 2.3%, New cars went from a 14.6% rate of inflation to a barely noticeable 0.3%, Used cars & trucks from 35.1% to 0.6%, and fuel for those vehicles from 46.1% down to minus 11.9%.

Of those categories that peaked in 2023, the record is similarly encouraging: Professional health services down in the Midwest from 3.8% to 2.6%, Home owners’ rental equivalent increase fell from 6.9% to 5.3%, rents on housing fell correspondingly from 7.3% to 5.2%, electricity declined from 9.8% increases to 3.9% and food eaten away from home dropped from a 9.2% increase to 3.6%.

To the extent that we still have some inflation, it is definitely tamed down from its worse raging of two to three years ago. That’s not a credit to the former or current President, but to the steady hand of the Federal Reserve which has shown moderation in its influence over interest rates.

You may have anticipated something on the price of eggs. The CPI does not report on egg prices for subnational regions. Nationally, egg prices, in March this year, were 60.4% higher than a year earlier. Today, my supermarket has them down from last week. That’s the hard-boiled truth.
Morton J. Marcus is an economist formerly with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. His column appears in Indiana newspapers, and his views can be followed his podcast.

© 2025 Morton J. Marcus

-30-