This chart has been making the rounds and I wanted to pull it out just in case someone needed a visual incentive to check out the article.
It's a great accounting of some of the points that we've made in our many inflation/CPI discussions.
Something I don't know how to balance with stuff like this is how much of it is nefarious (or in exactly what way is it nefarious). When we cover these different approaches in econ classes, there are plenty of reasons to choose the newer methods over the older (the inverse is often true as well). So, you hear them and go "Ok, those are reasons. I guess it's not nefarious." However, when you zoom out, it sure seems like all of these reasonable choices just happen to be very convenient for the regime.
We know CPI is useless because it ignores consumer spending items such as food and energy.
Excluding food is a joke and irresponsible
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That's certainly true. I didn't realize CPI included interest payments before 1983, which was obviously a big deal recently.
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