The CPI, For What It's Worth.

The official inflation rate, right now, is 4%. This is based on the CPI, or Consumer Price Index. The CPI "...represents changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households." It consists of a standard "basket" of goods and services that is monitored to get an idea what prices are doing in general.

Except it's not standard. The list of items in the CPI "basket" changes regularly over the years. You will notice that energy and food are conspicuously not included.

Energy and food: NOT included in the CPI.

You and I could easily come up with a better guage of the inflation rate. My gut feeling guage is that it's really somewhere between 10 and 15%, based on buying real groceries and real gasoline, and generally living in the real world. What do you think?

So the CPI:

• Is not standard

• Does not include prices of energy and food

And yet it claims to:

• "[represent] changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households".

Do they think we're stupid? Do we look stupid? Obviously we must.

This is an example of The Big Lie. The whopper that comes from a propaganda machine. People will believe big lies easier than small ones, that's how governments get away with outrageous behavior like hyperinflating money.


Sources:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm