No actually, I entered for July 2000 to July 2012 (lastest figures available) - - - the calculator on Shadowstats.com produces two numbers. One is the inflation based on the governments 'official' numbers - the C.P.I. - - that is, 'consumer price index'. But the economist John Williams, while working for industry noted that the government figures did not match the companies cost experience and they could no longer use them for planning purposes. He was tasked with finding out why this was so, and to come up with accurate inflation numbers. The CPI number was originally used to give people an idea of what it takes to maintain a constant standard of living. Starting in the early 1980s the government began to change the way their numbers are calculated in various ways. The inflation figure that is generally reported in the news does not include food & gasoline (a very large component of peoples expenses). Other tricks include using what they call 'hedonics' - - to give an example, if the price of steak is rising - - the government says "well, people would switch to hamburger" and substitute the hamburger price when calculating CPI. (This is for a figure that includes food - but is not generally reported in the news.) If the cost of what a person would have to pay to buy a computer goes up, but its 'capability' is considered greater - - they calculate as though the price had actually fallen based on their own made up estimates. The likely reason the methods for calculatiing these numbers were changed by the government, is political . . . politicians don't want the public to be alarmed & angered about rising inflation.
$150 in July of 2000 . . . based on current official CPI would be worth $198.88 in the lastest figures available - - July 2012 dollars.
If you calculate inflation based on the methods used all the way up until they started 'adjusting' them in the early 1980s - - - you get the $ 441.28 figure posted earlier.
The official year-to-year CPI inflation rate is about 1.5%.
Using the methods used prior to the early 1980s the rate of inflation of what an average person would have to spend to maintain their standard of living is around 9%.
Of course everyone's spending habits are different and any individual person could spend differently than 'average', but my own personal experience would lead me to believe that my living expenses are going up much, much more than 1.5% each year in order to maintain the same standard of living.
I subscribe to the
www.shadowstats.com website where they go into all this. I think quite a bit of the information is available there for non-subscribers too.
This is not exactly a 'gun topic', though it does affect their prices too. I hope this is interesting/useful to some of you. I wasn't going to go into all this, but a couple guys listed the 'official' CPI based calculations and I wanted to explain the basis of the numbers I posted earlier.
Regards everyone, - - -
