DENVER (KDVR) — The nation continues to battle inflation, and people in Colorado may be feeling it a bit more than others.
Experts said the region of the nation that Colorado is in is seeing higher inflation than others, and now data suggests we may see even higher prices soon.
“One of the things I think families in the Mountain West have been feeling more highly than everywhere else is the fact that our core necessities and the cost of those have been going up at an unsustainable rate,” said Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
Winegarden said Coloradans, and people in nearby states like Utah and Arizona, are being hit with high costs of several things needed to survive all at once.
“It’s actually going up faster in the Mountain West for things like transportation, food, energy, and housing. It is across the board for all of those factors,” Winegarden said.
Congress’s Joint Economic Committee said Colorado families are facing the highest inflation costs of transportation and shelter in their latest report.
Families are not the only ones in Colorado feeling the pinch. The Leed School of Business at the University of Colorado released new data. In a survey of 163 businesses, most of them said they were feeling the burden of inflation with 57 of them saying they plan to increase wages. Forty-seven percent of those businesses said that will lead to an increase in their prices.
“If prices don’t go up, then they are going to go out of business because their costs are going up. That’s really the hard part, that squeeze that businesses have been dealing with,” Winegarden said.
Winegarden said that hope is on the horizon as inflation is projected to cool down.
“The end of 2022 coming into 2023, we can start to see relief from the growth. Where we are, that is not going to come down. The rents are going to be as high as they are, but we aren’t going to continue to see an increase if we stay on our current policy path. So, I think that’s encouraging,” said Winegarden.
While the inflation cooldown gives us something to look forward to, experts are advising people not to go overboard with holiday spending noting the cooldown may not end until the festivities are over.