Falling gas prices caused U.S. consumer prices to drop at the fastest rate in four years.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last Thursday the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased 0.4 percent in April on a seasonally adjusted basis. Over the last 12 months, consumer prices rose 1.1 percent before seasonal adjustment. That is well below the Fed's 2 percent inflation goal. The U.S. central bank targets a different gauge of prices that tends to run cooler than the Labor Department's index.

Stateline has two interesting articles out related to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington. The first article, Not So Fast: Tax Revenue Estimates from Legal Marijuana May Not Materialize, takes a look at the projected economic impacts of marijuana legalization, especially in regards to tax policy. Potential tax revenue was one of the selling points of legalization, but it is difficult to estimate the true economic impact of legalized marijuana, in part because marijuana is currently a part of the cash-only economy. “Nobody has any idea (about revenue)," Jeffrey Miron, Harvard economist and analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Stateline.  He further hints that the only way to estimate the full impact of marijuana legalization may in fact be through legalization in all 50 states.

State personal income continued to increase in 2012, growing by 3.5 percent over 2011. That growth rate was slower, however, than in 2011, when income grew by 5.2 percent over 2010. Personal income grew the most in North Dakota in 2012—by an impressive 12.4 percent—while personal income fell slightly in South Dakota—the only state to have negative growth over the period—falling by 0.2 percent.

Real median household income fell between 2010 and 2011 by 1.5 percent—the second consecutive annual drop—landing at $50,054 in 2011. Nevada saw the biggest drop from 2010 to 2011 in real median household income—10.9 percent—while Oklahoma saw the biggest year over year increase—9.0 percent. Median household income in 2011 ranged from a low of $39,856 in Kentucky to a high of $68,876 in Maryland. From 2010 to 2011, 28 states experienced a decrease in real median household income while 21 states saw an increase and one state—North Carolina—saw no year-over-year change.

Nationally, real GDP increased 2.2 percent in 2012 compared with an increase of 1.5 percent in 2011. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE), nonresidential fixed investment, exports, residential fixed investment and private inventory investment contributed the most to the increase in real GDP in 2012, gains that were offset somewhat by negative contributions from public (federal, state and local) spending. 

Unemployment rates remained elevated in 2012, although rates have dropped since the Great Recession ended. In 2010, the national unemployment rate was 9.6 percent. Throughout 2011, the rate hovered around 9 percent, while the average annual rate was 8.1 percent for 2012. At the end of 2012, Nevada and Rhode Island had the highest unemployment rates, both hitting 10.2 percent. North Dakota reported the lowest rate at 3.2 percent.

Ohio Senate Bill 116, introduced by Democratic Senator Eric H. Kearney and co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Bill Seitz, aims to exempt cities with populations over 50,000 from the state open container laws.  Cities would be able to designate “entertainment districts”, a one-half mile square area within which alcohol could be purchased and carried on the streets.  The idea is modeled after other popular tourist destinations such as New Orleans, LA, Las Vegas, NV, Savannah, GA, and Memphis, TN which allow open containers in some public places.  

Elise Gould and Natalie Sabadish at the Economic Policy Institute recently took a look at health expenditure data and found some interesting patterns – chiefly that health spending in this country is distributed extremely differently among certain groups. As their cool infographic below shows, a big chunk of what we spend as a country on health care goes to a tiny fraction of the population. In fact, half of all health care dollars are spent by only five percent of the population, while the top 20 percent of spenders consume 82 percent of all health-care dollars.