I suspect your restaurant and café receipts are not representative of general price changes.
It’s not really all that different than the fraudulent way in which the intentionally deceptive unemployment rate is calculated that is pushed by all the governments’ sycophants. In the USA that process drops people from the calculation by simply assuming disinterest in employment if one has been unemployed for a certain time (yes, it’s intentionally deceptive and manipulative, largely to defraud and cheat the markets and countries that are honest about their unemployment rates).
ShadowStats has been tracking the real inflation rate for a few decades now since a major change was made to fudge the number. It should be pretty eye opening for some people.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
On a side note; it strikes me as a rather perplexing challenge that people seem to have a hard time adjusting their thinking to control for deceptive and manipulative practices, e.g., everyone who pays attention knows very well that the U.S. governments inflation numbers are literal fraud, yet they are the very number that drives so many aspects of everything. It’s like that meme scene in Idiocracy … “but fraudulent inflation rates are what the market craves” … “yes, but they’re causing illusion and deception to spread throughout the system that will cause collapse and ruin“ … * blank stare * “but fraudulent inflation rates is what the market craves”
Even if you did include it, the numbers wouldn't change. For every Seattle or Denver experiencing heavy growth in the housing markets, there's a dozen Lafayettes experiencing slow/no growth.
At a personal level, the CPI really isn't set up for cities. It is simply not considered in the CPI that housing would be such a big cost that would outweigh anything else. The "why" seems to be speculated by another poster, though I can't speak to that as I'm not deep enough into economics.
The opposite, people are in significantly larger and better equipped houses than they used to be.
I also think 20% is pretty steep outside of the most desirable areas in the US, which are akin to complaining about the pricing becoming unreasonable in your country club. The top end of the market shouldn't be used to track inflation, we should use the median.
Including X & Y may greatly skew the results higher or lower, but if the percentage of people purchasing X & Y are low, then they don't have much impact.
The CPI methodology isn't great, but it also isn't bad. Removing volatile sectors makes sense when trying to identify trends, but it doesn't make sense when those volatile sectors are a large component of consumer spend.
Since most of the data used by the CPI calculator is publicly available, it is possible for people to construct their own CPI metric and track it over time. This is helpful if you want to get an accurate indicator of the inflation you've experienced over time, or if you're wanting to push the narrative of higher/lower inflation over a period of time.
It’s bad for any discussion involving wages since your earnings need to go up by more than CPI to tread water, in popular areas.
What’s happening with housing is the opposite of shrinkflation. There’s always been more or less desirable neighborhoods. When you see prices skyrocketing in a particular neighborhood, it’s because that neighborhood is moving up market. But house prices across the country as a whole aren’t going up. It’s just that Mountain View has become what Scarsdale used to be, and the current version of Mountain View—a boring nowhere suburb with housing prices to match—is somewhere in the Kansas City or Dallas suburbs.
No, it doesn't. You are dropped from unemployment benefits after a certain time, but from the headline unemployment rate [0] only when you stop actively searching for work.
[0] and even then, those “discouraged workers” remain in other unemployment measures published by BLS. (U-4 through U-6, just not the headline U-3 rate, or the even smaller U-1 and U-2 rates.)
People mention exactly these three things every single time they say "actually inflation is super super high". The fact that nothing else ever comes up is evidence that the bulk of things have not inflated at rates outpacing the government documentation.
These three things are getting very expensive very fast. That's bad. Policies can be put into place to limit this. This is not evidence that the government is full of liars and really inflation is at 20%.
Health insurance went to zero. Back in 2001 there were copayments and my employer would deduct from my paycheck to purchase coverage.
Rent went to zero, or $266 if you count property tax. Back in 2001 my landlord made me pay $750 per month.
Education went to zero if you aren't fussy about your degree and aren't lazy. Dual-enrollment has become popular, letting students take college classes without paying. It's enough for a BA or BS degree. Suppose you insist on an engineering degree. Back in 2001 the cost was about $17,000 per year for me. Today it is about $16,000 per year for my son.
Meanwhile I'm paying about $48,000 per year for food, so I do care about that steak. Even the burger is $5 or $6 per pound, and the reasonable fish is $8 to $12 per pound.
Your rent went to zero: complete BS or you’re in some kind of unique situation that applies to only you. Housing is one of the main drivers of inflation.
Your education claim is equally ridiculous. I also don’t believe you spend $4k a month on groceries (but zero for rent).
I suppose my employer could have given me a raise instead of deciding to fully pay for the health insurance. The line item on my paycheck is gone now, and I didn't take a pay cut to make that happen. Actually I got a big raise at the time. 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, getting health insurance required that I grant permission to deduct part of it from my paycheck. That's gone. Although in theory I have a high deductible now, my employer effectively cancels that by putting an equal amount into a health savings account.
My rent went to zero because I bought a house and fully paid for it. It is 3109 square feet on 0.39 acres. In other words, there is no mortgage anymore. I suppose repairs might be needed at some point.
The education is really what I paid. I attended Northeastern University and UMass Lowell long ago, which was about $17,000 per year. I have a kid in University of Central Florida now, paying $16,000 per year. I have multiple kids at Eastern Florida State College now, attending for almost nothing because tuition is paid under a dual-enrollment agreement by the local school district. Even books are covered. We just pay for a $40 parking permit and $10 per semester for wireless network access.
I spend $4k a month on groceries because I have a family of 14, I shop at Publix (a normal nice-quality supermarket), and I have a fondness for things like fish and less-typical fruit. That estimate is a couple years old, so it might be higher now.
So really I'm not feeling any inflation. Power is cheap (thanks FPL), water is cheap, I no longer have to pay a long-distance provider per-minute phone charges, and fuel is still cheap. I went from having a car loan at 7% to just buying my cars in cash. For less money, I get a car with more seats and more power. Capitalism does a really nice job of making life affordable.
Maybe I'm the inflation. I cost more, but you won't find me in the consumer price index.
I don't know or really care how much my employer pays for the health insurance. My pay went up, not down, when they started paying 100% of health insurance.
I skip most car and house insurance, getting it only for liability. I'll take a risk on the cars or house needing to be replaced. I pay $266 per month for property taxes.
The house is a nice upgrade too. Over the years I have gradually upgraded from living near a heroin dealer and hearing gunshots at night, to a really peaceful street near the beach.
I'm just not seeing the inflation.
Even if I look around town at the cheap apartments, those are affordable. They go for $800 to $1200 per month here, which is not much more than I was paying 20 years ago. They can go for half that in many locations, such as near Dayton, OH.
My electric bill is 10x. My water bill is 6x-8x. I live in the same house and have the same consumption then and now.
My supermarket costs are 5x-7x.
So yes, real inflation has been pretty scary the last 10 years. On a silicon valley techie salary I can absorb these costs but it's still a huge increase.
Talking with some friends the other day about this topic, I projected the numbers for the next ten years if things were to continue on this path and the result would be that in ten years I won't be able to pay utilities + food on my salary. So presumably something will change or break, because that's not sustainable.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/General.aspx?id=12057
If you weren’t mining BTC in 2011 and are now, well sure your bill could, which I admit is all you claimed.
If the cost of your groceries doubles every ~2 years, you've got yourself a local problem. If this was caused by inflation, it would be the common experience of all Americans. And yet, the price of my groceries today is not noticably different than the price was two years ago.
Also, in 1990 it was ~$140/mo. Inflation was quite gradual from 1990 to 2010, the last 10 years have been brutal.
But the fact that prices have risen far faster than the official inflation numbers suggest is a trivially confirmable fact. Just look at what you paid for things years ago and now, compute percentage increase.
Even on an individual level, it's not easy at all to built an accurate price index. Not many people have complete and accurate records of all their expenditures even from just the current month. Close to zero have them for several years, let alone decades. So they usually go by memory and cherry picking.
> increased faster than CPI is quite difficult to confirm or dispute
There's nothing difficult about that. Take the cost of all necessites like utilities, food, clothing, transportation. Graph cost over time. Compute percentage change year to year. Observe that the increase is higher than officially reported inflation rate. None of these steps is difficult.
> Close to zero have them for several years, let alone decades. So they usually go by memory and cherry picking.
I have all my finances categorized in GNUCash back to the late 90s. Most of my friends seem to also have similar data, whether in quicken or elsewhere, so I doubt it's close to zero.
Can reconstruct from your bank records how many kWh electricity, gallons of gas, pounds of potatoes, cups of coffee, Gb of data or hours of video you consumed in 2015?
Shadowstats are not "tracking the real inflation for a few decades", they're just adding about 3 to 4 %-points to the BLS inflation and peddling those numbers as a paid subscription. If you want to want to know the *shocking truth about the Real Inflation* accoding to shadowstats, save yourself the money and brain damage of reading conspiracy sites: just download the official inflation from BLS or FRED and add 3-4%-point every month.
The implication of these shadowstats "true inflation numbers" is that the US economy has been in constant depression since the 1980s or so. I'll leave the credibility of that up to the reader.
Governments have incentives to use this to flatter the results or change inflation measures eg the UK and its switch to CPI from RPI for a lot of things.
Poor people actually can't escape service costs and pay for a lot more (seemingly) mandatory service costs that go away when you have enough money to stay away from them. I.e. the costs of not having a fridge at all vs being able to bulk shop at a warehouse are all massively higher.
The reality is, life got a lot better in the last decade. If you are measuring by that, prices are actually down (or did not increase that much). Today's iPhone would have been prohibitively expensive (if possible) and many houses did not have the amenities they have today (washing machine, cable, tech gadgets, etc...).