Why don’t you provide some data instead of conjecture. We generally don’t accept that the government inflation numbers are just plain wrong without substantiation.
That being said parent did not help himself throwing statements out there without a foundation.
Here is what i believe he should have said:
CPI for goods fails in the following:
Accounting for changes in sizes and quality of certain products (i.e. instead of raising prices vendor will lower quality or amount of product )
Accounting for healthcare costs is fundamentally flawed. This only factors out of pocket costs when the majority of americans are effectively paying 80% of healthcare premiums via reduced grosd wages in the form of "employer contributions"
Accounting for substitutions of products in the cpi itself which are not reliable substitutes, or the exclusion of certain items (housing) which are clearly inflationary.
There is also a lot of criticism made for the boskin commision changes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission to cpi which messed with base prices and thus with true measurement of cpi.
Data always trumps common sense, that's why we have science :) - if science had a motto that would be it! Sometimes we need more data, but common sense is often trivially wrong.
I would argue we do in fact need data to show the sky is blue. The data shows us the sky is not in fact "blue" but rather a blend of various peaks and valleys of radiation. [2] It's not so much blue as a bunch of colors at once that happen to be blue-dominant. Further it’s actually the “inverse of blue” in that blue is allowed to pass but all the other colors are absorbed.
> Accounting for substitutions of products in the cpi itself which are not reliable substitutes, or the exclusion of certain items (housing) which are clearly inflationary.
Housing on a $/sqft basis has tracked inflation since the 1970s across the US. What's changed is zoning policy, but zoning policy isn't a function of money supply. [1]
A reduction in welfare is not necessarily inflation or monetary policy, it can just as easily be social policy. You can't pin all society's ills on the evil Fed and their consistent and predictable 2% rate of inflation.
> Accounting for healthcare costs is fundamentally flawed.
Healthcare costs exceed inflation. That's not a function of monetary policy, it's a function of a fundamentally flawed healthcare system in the US that needs to be fixed. That's not the Fed's job, that's social policy.
> There is also a lot of criticism made for the boskin commision changes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission to cpi which messed with base prices and thus with true measurement of cpi.
Peoples needs, wants and expectations change over time. In the same way the S&P 500 and Dow Jones cycle through companies that are no longer relevant, doing so with the CPI basket is the only rational thing to do. For instance, Caviar and Lobster used to be crap food for poor people -- they're crazy expensive now. Is that inflation? Of course not. Totally fair to eject them from the basket.
