What the media has been reporting about the inflation rate is already very high. Most often inflation is reported as the highest it’s been in 40 years. It actually could be much higher.
The feds have been changing the definition of inflation over the past four of five decades, to cover up how bad things really are. Thomas Elliott explained on twitter: “The CPI [Consumer Price Index] as originally conceived was intended to track the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. In 1980, the Fed altered its tool for calculating inflation such that it was no longer measuring a constant “basket of goods” but rather a “quasi-substitution-based[…] basket of goods”; now, via “hedonics,” the Fed would, for example, use tech improvements to offset rising prices (i.e., if a computer is 25 percent faster than the year prior but the price remained the same, the Fed claimed a 25 percent price drop in generalized … 6/[…] computing power, which enabled them to suppress headline CPI numbers on net). In 1990, the Fed again evolved the CPI so that these tricks for downplaying “official” inflation were exacerbated.”
The government is good at playing tricks, to make what they are doing look better. Both parties have been guilty of playing that game, but it’s been glaring with the Biden administration. Biden has blamed Bidenflation on anything but himself, including on Trump, Covid-19 and Putin.
The media by and large goes along with what the government spoons out to them, especially if the administration is of the Democrat variety. Certainly, they didn’t go along with anything Trump said or did, but they wanted Biden to succeed so badly, they’ve been willing to help him with his misinformation.
And yet, even though it’s bad, the media have been forced to report that inflation is as at a 40 year high. The problem is, it’s actually worse than that.
As Tom Elliott tweeted, “…consistent data is available via ShadowStats, where economist John Williams updates inflation data using the Fed’s original CPI calculator.” Regarding inflation, ShadowStats says “[i]n general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living.”
Elliott tweeted that a review of ShadowStats data shows that “this year the real inflation numbers are slightly more than 2x the official numbers.” He went on: “…if current trends hold…May’s annualized inflation rate will be just north of 17 percent. As a reminder, the worst of Jimmy Carter’s stagflation era topped out at 14.5 percent.”
The Biden administration has given up on bringing gas prices down
And there you have it folks. Using inflation as the standard, and using real numbers, not what the government wants us to think they are, Biden’s economy is worse than Jimmy Carter’s was in the 1970’s. And that was pretty bad. Elliott also tweeted that “[t]his year we’ll soon see Americans’ losing 20 percent of the value of their paycheck through inflation alone. Is your paycheck going as far as it did when Trump was President?
