The government claims there is no inflation to speak of but yet they print paper money in unfathomable amounts with no physical wealth backing it. That by definition, will cause inflation. And they conveniently leave out the items from the Consumer Price Index that people need in their daily lives the most to exist on, like food, gas, energy and housing.
But they claim there has been no significant inflation for the last forty years. Bullpucky.
“But they claim there has been no significant inflation for the last forty years. Bullpucky.”
If you’re into math, it’s fascinating to track the changes made to the methodology used in calculating the CPI. Hedonic regression, substitution (for a market basket of goods fer chrissake), the newly proposed chain-averaging (already used to calculate the GDP deflator).
If we calculated the current CPI with the methodology used in the 1980’s the current inflation rate would be around 6%, and if we calculated the CPI with the methodology used in the 1970’s the current inflation rate would be around 10%.
That’s quite a bit different than the absurd claim from the current CPI that we’re dealing with 1%ish inflation.
There are proposed changes in the works that would further underestimate inflation.
The BLS figures for unemployment have undergone similar revisions in methodology calculated to intentionally under-report unemployment. If we used Carter-Era methodologies to calculate both inflation and unemployment, the current “misery index” would hovering around 30ish (versus Carter’s highest of 22).
Beware politicians that redefine the yardsticks used to measure their job performance.