Use your brain wrote:
jamin wrote:Because it is inconsistent with my personal experience and because the government has a vested interest in underreporting inflation.
Don't confuse your anecdotal experience with statistical data.
Your personal experience is your personal experience and a poor proxy for the rate of inflation across all goods and services and across the entire United States.
Why in the world would you expect your personal experience to perfectly match that of the entire macroeconomy? Besides, have you even tried to rigorously calculate your "personal" rate of inflation? The answer might surprise you.
Why don't you use your brain first? The basket of goods and services that the government uses to rig the inflation number expressly excludes many items that most people pay for that increase in price. Here are just a few:
fruits and vegetables, gasoline, fuel oil, natural gas, intercity transportation, tobacco and mortgage interest, as well as all indirect taxes.
So all of those MTA and cab fare hikes, all of those increased airport, car rental, cigarette and cell phone taxes, and all of your more expensive mortgage payments are completely omitted. You also can toss in your health care premiums which, contrary to what Barry wants you to believe, have gone up enormously for many people (particularly when you add in the 3.8% surcharge for Obamacare on income above $200K).
You have to be completely clueless if you don't understand why the government has a massive incentive to under-report inflation -- how do you think we pay for all of the things we can't afford but nonetheless pay for anyway? We go into debt and we go into debt by selling government securities to people like the Chinese. Do you think we can sell more or less debt if we lie and say that inflation is lower than it really is? You don't need to know a lot of bond math to know that the answer is more.