Contents
	Age Bracket
	U.S. Region
	Income Bracket
	Contributions Category
	Full Report (printer friendly PDF)

General Information regarding the Consumer Expenditure Survey

One benefit of the CE is its unbiased data. The Mission Statement of the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics reads:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the principal fact-finding agency for the Federal Government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. The BLS is an independent national statistical agency that collects, processes, analyzes, and disseminates essential statistical data to the American public, the U.S. Congress, other Federal agencies, State and local governments, business, and labor. The BLS also serves as a statistical resource to the Department of Labor.

BLS data must satisfy a number of criteria, including relevance to current social and economic issues, timeliness in reflecting today’s rapidly changing economic conditions, accuracy and consistently high statistical quality, and impartiality in both subject matter and presentation.¹

The BLS, among its various activities, is the source for the following indexes:

Producer price index (PPI)—This index, dating from 1890, is the oldest continuous statistical series published by BLS. It is designed to measure average changes in prices received by producers of all commodities, at all stages of processing, produced in the United States…

Consumer price indexes (CPI)—The CPI is a measure of the average change in prices over time in a ‘‘market basket’’ of goods and services purchased either by urban wage earners and clerical workers or by all urban consumers. In 1919, BLS began to publish complete indexes at semiannual intervals, using a weighting structure based on data collected in the expenditure survey of wage-earner and clerical-worker families in 1917-19 (BLS Bulletin 357, 1924)…

International price indexes—The BLS International Price Program produces export and import price indexes for nonmilitary goods traded between the United States and the rest of the world.²

Among the numerous applications of the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, the Survey is used for periodic revision of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Following are excerpted comments from a “Brief Description of the Consumer Expenditure Survey.”

The current CE program was begun in 1980. Its principal objective is to collect information on the buying habits of U.S. consumers. Consumer expenditure data are used in a variety of research endeavors by government, business, labor, and academic analysts. In addition, the data are required for periodic revision of the CPI.

The survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, consists of two components: A diary or recordkeeping, survey…and an interview survey, in which expenditures of consumer units are obtained in five interviews conducted at 3-month intervals…

Each component of the survey queries an independent sample of consumer units that is representative of the U.S. population…The Interview sample, selected on a rotating panel basis, surveys about 7,500 consumer units each quarter. Each consumer unit is interviewed once per quarter, for 5 consecutive quarters. Data are collected on an ongoing basis in 105 areas of the United States.³

The BLS, in commenting on the various functions of the Consumer Expenditure Survey, observed that, “Researchers use the data in a variety of studies, including those that focus on the spending behavior of different family types, trends in expenditures on various expenditure components including new types of goods and services, gift-giving behavior, consumption studies, and historical spending trends.”⁴

Writing in the mid-1980s with reference to the then forthcoming Consumer Expenditure Survey-based revisions in the CPI, eminent business columnist Sylvia Porter remarked that the CPI is “the most closely watched, widely publicized and influential government statistic we have…”

In addition to the fact that the “CPI is used to adjust federal tax brackets for inflation,” a glimpse into the wide-ranging, Consumer Expenditure Survey-based network of CPI usage in American culture is gained from the following information:

The CPI is the most widely used measure of inflation and is sometimes viewed as an indicator of the effectiveness of government economic policy. It provides information about price changes in the Nation’s economy to government, business, labor, and private citizens and is used by them as a guide to making economic decisions. In addition, the President, Congress, and the Federal Reserve Board use trends in the CPI to aid in formulating fiscal and monetary policies.

The CPI and its components are used to adjust other economic series for price changes and to translate these series into inflation-free dollars. Examples of series adjusted by the CPI include retail sales, hourly and weekly earnings, and components of the National Income and Product Accounts…

The CPI is often used to adjust consumers’ income payments (for example, Social Security) to adjust income eligibility levels for government assistance and to automatically provide cost-of-living wage adjustments to millions of American workers. As a result of statutory action the CPI affects the income of about 80 million persons: the 51.6 million Social Security beneficiaries, about 21.3 million food stamp recipients, and about 4.6 million military and Federal Civil Service retirees and survivors. Changes in the CPI also affect the cost of lunches for 28.4 million children who eat lunch at school, while collective bargaining agreements that tie wages to the CPI cover over 2 million workers. Another example of how dollar values may be adjusted is the use of the CPI to adjust the Federal income tax structure. These adjustments prevent inflation-induced increases in tax rates, an effect called bracket creep…

Data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey conducted in 2001 and 2002, involving a national sample of more than 30,000 information families, provided detailed information on respondents’ spending habits. This enabled BLS to construct the CPI market basket of goods and services and to assign each item in the market basket a weight, or importance, based on total family expenditures…⁷

¹  “Mission Statement”; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; Last Modified Date: October 16, 2001; <http://www.bls.gov/bls/blsmissn.htm>; p. 1 of 8/15/05 4:59 PM printout.
²  U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2006, 125th edition; published 2005; <http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/06statab/prices.pdf>; pp. 479, 481 of 5/31/06 printout.
³  “Consumer Expenditures in 2004”; Report 992; U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; April 2006; <http://www.bls.gov/cex/csxann04.pdf>; pp. 4-5 of 5/30/06 printout.
⁴  Consumer Expenditure Survey “Frequently Asked Questions”; U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Surveys, Branch of Information and Analysis; Last Modified Date: March 17, 2005; <http://www.bls.gov/cex/csxfaqs.htm>; p. 2 of 5/28/05 10:32 AM printout.
5 Sylvia Porter, “Out-of-Date Consumer Price Index to Be Revised in ’87,” a “Money’s Worth” column appearing in Champaign (Ill.) News-Gazette, January 9, 1985, sec. D, p. 3.
⁶ “Price Index Undergoes Statistical Adjustment,” an Associated Press (Washington) article appearing in the Champaign (Ill.) News-Gazette, April 19, 1998, sec. C, p. 1.
⁷ Consumer Price Indexes “Addendum to Frequently Asked Questions”; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Division of Consumer Prices and Price Indexes; Last Modified Date: March 28, 2005; <http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpiadd.htm#2_1>; pp. 1-2 of 5/31/06 10:54 AM printout.