(The Center Square) – Consumer prices increased more than expected in June as Americans face higher prices on a wide range of imported goods as President Donald Trump’s tariffs show up in federal economic reports for the first time.

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or CPI-U, showed a 0.3% increase last month – triple May’s 0.1% pace and the most significant monthly gain since January, when Trump returned to the White House for his second term.

On an annual basis, inflation was at 2.7%, up from 2.4% in May. That’s above the 2.6% yearly gain economists had projected for June. Core CPI, which excludes fast-moving food and energy prices, rose 0.2% over the month and 2.9% over the past year. That was in line with forecasts.

“Indexes that increased over the month include household furnishings and operations, medical care, recreation, apparel, and personal care,” the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. “The indexes for used cars and trucks, new vehicles, and airline fares were among the major indexes that decreased in June.”

According to the report, the index for shelter rose 0.2% in June and was the primary factor in the monthly increase for all items.

Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust LP, said tariffs weren’t to blame.

“Core CPI up just 0.2%. But, year-ago comparisons are tough and the year-over-year ‘core’ rose slightly to 2.9%,” he wrote in a post on X. “Better to look at 3-month annualized changes. The 3-month annualized increase was just 2.4%, down from 3.6% in February. Tariffs don’t cause inflation.”

Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who spent eight years as a top economic adviser to former President Barack Obama, said tariffs were the cause. 

“You can see signs of tariffs in these numbers and that is only likely to grow,” he said.

Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, was more neutral about the report.

“These numbers are pretty much in line with expectations,” he wrote on X. “The absence of bad news is good news.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the report shows that tariffs aren’t raising prices.

“Every month since President Trump took office, core inflation – the best measure of inflation – has beat or matched expectations,” she said. “The data proves that President Trump is stabilizing inflation and the Panicans continue to be wrong about tariffs raising prices.”

(The Center Square) — The sale of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays to a Florida developer could be finalized by September, according to a report in The Athletic. 

The story says the $1.7 billion deal by a group led by Jacksonville developer Patrick Zalupski, Bill Cosgrove, Ken Babby and prominent Tampa Bay investors will likely keep the team in the Tampa Bay area. The team announced sole negotiations with the consortium in June. 

Last month, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor and St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch both welcomed the possibility of a sale of the team by Rays’ owner Stuart Sternberg, who bought the team for $200 million in 2004. 

Castor said Tampa would “dust off” its previous stadium proposal, which possibly could result in the team moving across Tampa Bay to Hillsborough County. 

The Rays pulled out of a deal in March for a new $1.3 billion retractable roof stadium in St. Petersburg’s historic Gas Plant District as part of a larger $6.5 billion mixed-use development.

At the time, Welch said new ownership would be needed for the city to consider a new stadium deal. He said “that bridge had been burned.”

The Rays’ existing domed stadium, Tropicana Field, had its roof shredded by the Category 3 winds of Hurricane Milton in 2024. The City Council voted to repair the roof in April at a cost of more than $55 million and have it ready for baseball by the 2026 season.

Under the existing stadium agreement between the Rays and the city, each year Tropicana Field remains unusable adds another year to the agreement that was originally to sunset in 2027. Now it’s been pushed out to 2028, and depending on when repairs to the roof are complete, possibly longer. 

The Rays have gone through four unrealized stadium plans in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area and are playing their home games at George Steinbrenner Field this season in Tampa. Steinbrenner Field is the spring training home of the New York Yankees, the Rays’ American League East rival.

The team is one of two Major League clubs that are playing at minor league facilities. The Athletics are in Sacramento during a transition from Oakland to Las Vegas. 

As reported previously by The Center Square, Zalupski is based out of Jacksonville and is the founder, president and CEO of Dream Finders Homes, which has constructed 35,100 homes in 10 states.

He is also a member of the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis with a term that expires in 2028. Dream Finders went public in 2021. 

(The Center Square) – In 1990, Dan Apple was more than halfway through his undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro when he decided to leave school for the workforce.

“I mistakenly thought that I knew everything and would be fine without finishing college,” Apple told The Center Square. “It didn’t take long to figure out that it wasn’t true. But by that time, I’ve had a wife, I had a kid, responsibilities. House payments.”

Apple, co-valedictorian of his high school class, did well in the business world without a degree, working first as a dispatcher for a trucking company and later owning a freight brokerage company. More recently, he has worked as a project manager for a precast concrete company.

As he grew older, Apple began to wish that he had finished college.

“Many of the people I deal with are engineers,” he said. “There are people with master’s in business administration degrees. There are lawyers. There is just a myriad of higher education that I am dealing with every day.”

He is not alone. There are an estimated 1 million North Carolinians who left college before earning their degree, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

The University of North Carolina System is working with a company, ReUp Education, to help students like Apple return to college even decades after they left. Ten universities in the UNC System are participating, including UNC Greensboro, where Apple has reenrolled thanks to guidance from the program.

He expects to earn his degree by the end of this year at the age of 55.

“I sent in a request for information and within minutes I got an e-mail and we set up a time for a phone call,” Apple said. “It was a super easy process to get started. All my questions were answered immediately.”

His first class was a summer course in U.S. History. It was a lot different than the college classes he remembered.

“The world changed from 1990 to 2024,” he said. “There was no such thing as a laptop computer when I quit college. Now we are doing everything online.”

This time around, Apple has taken his college classes much more seriously than he did in the first round.

“I am a much better student than I ever was,” Apple said.

Shun Robertson, the system’s senior vice president for Policy and Strategy told the Center Square University System President Peter Hans has a “keen interest” in adult learners.

Since 2023, more than 600 North Carolina students have earned their degrees through the Reup program, Robertson said. The Legislature has funded financial aid options for the returning students as well.

“These are students who have already invested in their education but had to pause before completing their degree,” Robertson said. “ReUp gives us a proactive way to say, ‘We haven’t forgotten about you. We are going to help you finish what you started.”