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Here are two numbers that should be key to resolving an intensifying, crucial economic and political debate – over why so the polls show that most Americans keep giving the Biden administration such lousy economic grades even though the torrid inflation marking its term has become decidedly less torrid.

They’re 13.45 percent and 14.19 percent and they represent a major – and perhaps the most important – measures of how much U.S. prices have climbed in total since Mr. Biden’s first full month as President in February 21. That is, they tell us the cumulative loss of purchasing power Americans have suffered since his administration began.

And in the process, they reinforce an argument that’s been largely ignored by an unusually wide range of analysts. These include pundits who are all but open shills for Bidenomics (New York Times columnist, and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, and the Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell readily come to mind); to academic economists (who like most scholars are pretty pro-Biden themselves, especially if they’ve served in Democratic administrations).

Their explanations tend to focus on Mr. Biden’s ineffectiveness as a communicator, on the hyper-partisanship of Republicans who for purely political reasons refuse to give the administration any credit for any accomplishments (especially during an election year), and (something that’s clearly ROTFL funny) relentlessly negative press coverage that keeps battering the President.

Pushback to this narrative, including mine, stresses the total Biden inflation rate since President Biden took office out of confidence that how badly the electorate’s living standards have actually dropped in absolute terms since the President took office is what’s really (and understandably) stuck in voters’ craws – not whether price increases have slowed month-to-month or year-on-year.

Not that impressive statistical evidence for this proposition has been MIA. It’s easy to go onto the Labor Department’s website each month and track the widely followed Consumer Price Index (CPI) and see how it’s surged or tumbled or remained stable over varying periods of time, including very long ones.

From February, 2021 through last month’s official reading, the headline number is up by 17.15 percent, which of course includes the uptick in inflation-adjusted wages of the last few months. The core inflation reading has risen by a better 15.69 percent. That’s the measure that strips out food and energy prices supposedly because they’re too volatile to gauge accurately the economy’s main, underlying inflation trends. But of course, they’re both irreplaceable staples of human existence, so because this is a political as well as economic analysis, their overall decreased affordability can’t help but linger with special prominence in voters’ minds.

But the two other figures mentioned at the start are special because they represent the cumulative living standards loss according to the Commerce Department’s Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index. And the PCE is the favored inflation metric of the Federal Reserve, Washington’s main inflation-fighting agency.

Its cumulative inflation measures unfortunately aren’t published anywhere official (at least not that I can find). But using a little simple math, they can be calculated by adding up the published annual numbers. And they show that under President Biden, headline inflation has worsened by 14.19 percent, and core inflation by 13.45 percent.

They’re smaller bites from living standards, but by any measure, they’re still awfully big. Moreover, don’t forget: All measures of PCE and CPI show that inflation is still rising in absolute terms, and that the typical American individual and household keep falling behind economically. So maybe voters’ views of the cost of living, along with inflation and Bidenomics, aren’t so mysterious after all?