Author: Zachary Milne
The chart below – inspired by the American Enterprise Institute’s “Chart of the Century”[i] – displays 23 years of cumulative changes in the price of consumer goods and services in Arizona. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produces a historical price index for select metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). The price changes represented here are for the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale MSA, and may not be fully representative of price changes across the entire state.
While on average, consumer prices have risen 92% since the turn of this century, the prices of six goods have more than doubled – gasoline (+260%), home prices (+214%), rent (+167%), medical care (+154%), college tuition (+119%), and food away from home (+114%).
For context, average hourly earnings in Arizona have increased 94% over this time[ii].
Chart Sources
Below are the sources of the data used to construct the “Arizona Prices in the 21st Century” chart.
© 2023 Common Sense Institute
[i] Perry, Mark. “Chart of the Day… or Century?”. American Enterprise Institute. January 14, 2020.
[ii] Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Data before 2007 was estimated by CSI based on national measures of hourly income.