It turns out a lot is in a name.
Stats NZ gave us the latest household living-costs price indexes.
This is what we pay for stuff. This is the cost of our living or, as is more often than not referred to by the media and the miserable, the "cost of living crisis".
In that name, "the cost of living crisis", lies a lot of our problems. And a lot of our problems lie in our attitude.
The "cost of living crisis" no longer exists. It arrived in Covid and it roughly finished when inflation dropped back to a more orderly level.
Now this is not to say things are perfect, or brimming, or bullish. It's just that it's not as bad as it was, nor indeed anywhere close.
But we've decided the "cost of living crisis" has stuck. It makes us feel justified in moaning and it gives some political operators ammunition.
The actual increase in our cost of living was 3.2%. That's actually not bad. It's not great, but it's not bad and just about in the Reserve Bank band.
If you take out petrol, which has nothing to do with us, it would have been way lower.
What was way lower was the interest rate costs on the mortgage. See, not everything is going up.
We hear a lot about power and rates, and rightly so, but little about the mass saving that has arrived in our bank accounts by paying interest rates that by any historic reading are quite low.
Like all stories your individual circumstances matter; how much petrol you use, what your income is, what industry you are in, what sort of pay rise you got, etc. They are in fact, the majority of people you know, doing fine.
They have plentiful work, they are well paid, they have savings, take holidays, wish the power bill was cheaper but, by and large, life is decent and there is no crisis.
It's getting close to the time that if we can get the war out of the way, the oil at about $70 a barrel consistently, and renewable power supply dropping generation prices, we will actually arrive economically at a pretty good spot.
At 3.2% with a war, we are close to being maybe 2% without one.
And that is what they call a sweet spot. All that’s left is for those obsessed with the negativity of a crisis to recognise that it isn't.
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