Diesel is out of sight, propane has rocketed, gasoline up solidly, food is much higher than being admitted to due to comparing airline prices, automobile prices, and clothing prices in the market basket.
Any dolt knows joe sixpack doesn’t fly a lot, that he doesn’t buy a car all that often, and that winter clothes are now on sale (so are cars and tickets...winter sales.)
So, because something I don’t buy has gone down, and something that I absolutely must have and must buy has risen dramatically, then that means that prices aren’t changing for the worse.
Can anyone say: “discouraged workers” “dropping out of the labor force” “U3” and “manipulation of numbers”?
The books are on fire.. they are no longer just cooking them.
What’s wrong with the government’s inflation calculations? You can’t eat $10 DVD players from China...
Our government is no longer capable of telling the truth... bread and circus... the emperor must keep the masses tranquil.
These numbers have been managed since LBJ. The idea is that is inflation is managed low, net GDP is higher than it really is.
First, trust nothing from this administration.
Second, the CPI is a farce so laughable it is not to be taken seriously.
A box of granola bars use to have 6 bars, now 5.
Items that came in one pound bags now have 14 ounces.
Ice cream was 1/2 gallon.
Everything on the sorecshelves come in bigger boxes with less product while the CPI still counts it per box.
Real inflation since zero is at least 25% higher now than 2008.
I can make those clothes last a little longer. I can keep that car a few years longers. I can stop travelling. But I have to pay for energy. This is all a fraud.
FYI the concept of beef vs chicken came from the government’s Boskin Commission Report which was created by
The Advisory Commission To Study The Consumer Price Index (aka The Boskin Commission) was appointed by the Senate Finance Committee to study the role of the CPI in government benefit programs and to make recommendations for any needed changes in the CPI.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html
Beef vs chicken was used as an example of ‘substitution’.
The official gooberment figures say that $9.71 equals $1.00 in the year 1950 in buying power. I say that anyone who believes that is either too young to have any knowledge based on experience or is too gullible to be allowed to leave the house unescorted.
I entered first grade in 1950. Lunch at school cost five pennies then, gasoline was about twenty cents a gallon. A 1950 Ford “Fordor” sedan cost $1472. No, that is not a typo, you can look it up. There were fifty acre farms with houses being sold for five thousand dollars. It was several years later than that when my parents turned down the chance to buy the house in which my mother had been born along with a lot of barns and outbuildings and 54 acres for $6000. because “the price was mighty high”. There were houses that could be rented here for twenty dollars a month or even less. A new Ford 8n farm tractor sold for less than it will fetch on the used market 64 years later. I can recall married men saying that they were making one dollar an hour so they were doing OK. The gooberment figures are ridiculously, absurdly, amazingly low and based on nothing more than feel good adjustments designed to keep social security down. They tell you that social security was never meant to be enough to support someone without other income but there definitely was a time when it was possible to live well enough in this part of the country with just a social security check. I knew plenty of people who used to do just that. In fact a lot of families got by for a whole year on what my current monthly social security is. If you owned a home mortgage free and had no other debts you could do as well or better than most working people can do today other than not having cable TV with nothing worth watching or not being able to text on a cell phone. On the other hand you could buy a new handgun from Sears and it would be delivered to your mailbox. If you stood by the road in a military uniform and held up a sign saying “Praise Jesus” someone would stop and thank you for the privilege of giving you a ride rather than spitting on you.
Yup...I don’t fly but I do drive. MY “CPI” is Cartereque stagflationary!