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Everyone knows inflation isn't just 8%.

One of the ways that they've gained the system with respect to inflation is something called hedonic adjustment. Basically, if this month you can afford to eat steak and next month you can afford to eat chicken but the chicken is the same as the steak was in terms of price then prices haven't risen. If the month after that you move from chicken to bologna, prices haven't risen. If the month after that you move from bologna to organ meats, prices haven't risen. That's despite the fact that steak meanwhile has gone up a thousand percent.

Another thing that they do is they will arbitrarily claim that something whose prices have gone up actually hasn't had the prices go up because the quality is better than it was. For example, if computers go up they can just say well computers are faster than they were they're a better thing so even though computers went up they actually didn't.

For homes, rather than going out and finding the average rents in different cities, they use this completely fake number called owner's adjusted rent where they ask a bunch of people who don't pay rent what their rent would be if they paid rent. You can imagine that this insane false number doesn't actually contribute to anything.

According to a lot of people, if we still measured inflation the way they did in the 1980s, inflation would be at least double what it is now.
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I do believe that was a big part of it, yes. They've been gaming the numbers hard. We'd be at 1970s levels of inflation if we measured the same way we did back then.