If your family are experiencing inflation higher than 20%, it's because you're consuming more of things which inflate faster than the basket.
This is the point where the burden on proof lays with those that claim the government methodology is relevant: What is the "basket of things" composition and how many Americans have a spending profile anywhere near that?
They present it as a way of looking at forex rates. If 1 USD buys you 1 swiss franc, but a Big Mac costs $5 here and 7 CHF there, then maybe the franc is overvalued. In any case you lose McDonald's purchasing power by converting.
But you could just as easily use it for inflation.
Big Macs are a stable product. A Big Mac sold in 1985 is very similar to one sold yesterday. Also, it includes a good mix of basic inputs. Land rents, transport costs, labor, and food ingredients.
Here's the raw data.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data/...
In the US, a Big Mac cost $2.54 in 2001 and $5.65 in 2021.
That works out to 4.0% annual inflation.
https://www.google.com/search?q=(5.65%2F2.54)%5E(1%2F20)&oq=...
The official numbers were 2% that entire time. Those come from a complex calculation using an always-shifting basket.
What keeps the CPI down is technological progress in other goods, like cars and TVs.
By the end of my tenure at McDonald's, we were cooking patties and storing them in steam warmers for up to 30 minutes before tossing them. The same patties were used for regular burgers and Big Macs. We'd create Big Macs as needed by demand, assembling them later.
I don't know the #s, but was told that this change was to reduce product waste.
Grilling equipment and process also changed over this time period, slightly reducing the number of staff needed to run the grill and reduce the likelihood of overcooked (and thus wasted) meat.
I imagine numerous other efficiencies/changes have been made over the decades that would influence the cost to make Big Macs.
There are a lot of ways to make things cheaper. The world has seen startling progress in logistics, organisation, science and tech in the last 30 years. Some of that is applicable to gathering food more cheaply.
I suppose maybe all the gains could have been eaten up (heh heh) by population growth. The underlying equilibrium here isn't static, at any rate. The real price of a hamburger will not be steady.
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-producti...
That big mac is at the end of a literally global supply chain. The cost of the tires on the car of the fry cook and the number of temperature sensors one can afford to put in the reefer ship that gets the tomatoes from Argintina all have an impact on the overhead of a big mac. And this is in addition to all the direct process improvements others have mentioned. Heck, the internet has opened up a whole new world of operational efficiency for the farmer that grows the grain that feeds the cattle. He can buy parts for his machines or compare spec sheets for fertilizers from his iphone while sitting in the cab of his tractor that almost drives itself. In 2001 he had to thumb through a catalog or call someone.
1) Self-order kiosks. Definitely reduce costs and required number of workers needed at any time substantially.
2) Scheduling applications. More efficiently schedule workers, trade shifts, etc.
3) Improved warehouse, distribution infrastructure, logistics, coordination software, optimization around deliveries, predicted usage, etc.
Honestly, what they need is a voice AI to take your order in the mobile app.
- more reliable bun-making machines that need a lower ratio of human oversight / bun produced.
- more automation in packaging the meat patties.
The price of a big mac obeys supply and demand.
The actual cost of producing it is but one factor in many in the final price, and likely not the most important.
Where the hump is in the price vs actual volume of Big Mac sold curve actually is what matters.
Other than that price differences in food between $ and CHF are likely mostly explained because work hours simply cost a lot more around here.
Not sure why you would think that. McDonalds is famous for catering it's menu and service to it's locale.
In Australia they were required to serve real chicken in their nuggets, and they're always advertising that they use locally sourced beef for their burgers.
They also rebranded in a sense to upmarket themselves, and started selling salads, cakes and coffees in order to sneak a foot into the Australian cafe scene.
Hence, it’s a non standard product, and a pretty dumb basis for an index.
I saw Americans amazed at Europe’s “real cheese”, and Coca-Cola with “real sugar”. I have never heard the explanation for “real chicken” yet.
This is funny and scary at the same time.
USA (according to https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/chicken-mcnuggets... ) :
Ingredients: White Boneless Chicken, Water, Vegetable Oil (canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil), Enriched Flour (bleached Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Bleached Wheat Flour, Yellow Corn Flour, Vegetable Starch (modified Corn, Wheat, Rice, Pea, Corn), Salt, Leavening (baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Calcium Lactate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Spices, Yeast Extract, Lemon Juice Solids, Dextrose, Natural Flavors.
Australia (according to the PDFs here https://mcdonalds.com.au/maccas-food/nutrition ):
Ingredients: Chicken, Water, Flour (Wheat, Corn), Canola Oil, Starch (1420, 1422, Corn, Wheat, Tapioca), Mineral Salts (450, 500, 451, 341, 327), Salt, Spices (Celery, White Pepper, Black Pepper), Sunflower Oil, Dextrose.
It was Pink Slime for awhile. "Real Chicken" is the continuing strategy to claw back from the PR nightmare.
https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-debunks-rumor-about-mcnugg...
Even assuming the 2% numbers are more representative of the average household, the 4% big mac number sounds entirely consistent with that.
TL;DR: this is interesting, but I don't see how this data clarifies anything.
I'm not an economist, but one fundamental problem with any consumer index (as far as I can see) is that as you become richer in absolute terms the marginal utility of any additional dollar goes down (eg your life doesn't change that much if you upgrade your already expensive phone but it changes a heck of a lot if you can't afford to buy enough food) and therefore poorer people experience far more harm from inflation than richer people. Not sure any index ever captures that effect adequately.
It sure seems like the big three these days are housing, food, and gas.
Housing is complicated, because it's less elastic. Moving sucks, is expensive and kind of emotional. It's sorta sticky because it's such an ordeal, so (I think) there's some scalping, charging a bit more because making a switch is just a pain in the ass.
Food is weird. if you can put together a hotplate and a sink, food can be relativly inexpensive, and tasty, but time consuming. If you can't it's pretty ugly. Personally, I'd probably just go with multivitamins and beer. Dual duty as calories and entertainment. That's a disaster long term though.
Gasoline sucks because it's a magnifying effect. Take a bag of rice. the rice gets trucked somewhere to get packaged. the bag gets trucked from a factory, the plastic gets trucked to the factory. Every step has a transportation cost, and it compounds.
I'm not rich. I could take a long break from work if I needed to, but I gotta work. I'm very lucky to be where I am. CPI makes a lot of sense for me.
I think it's not so great because a cop and a teacher couple with no kids, totally reasonable professions, damn near a Rockwell painting, struggle.
I don't think it'll ever be easy for everyone. but damn. does it have to be so damn hard at the bottom? I think the CPI doesn't really work out for the bottom N% and I'm not really sure of the value of N. I hope N is still kinda small, because if N gets big, things get really ugly for everyone.
I dunno. CPI is a metric. it has a meaning. mean median and mode have meaning, but they don't tell the whole story. I think CPI highlights some things, but don't think for a second it's the whole story.
A lot of people don't realise inflation is essentially a stealth cash wealth tax. It applies to savings, debt, dollar-denominated contracts, etc.
The poor don't hold debt. "I live in a nice house that's still owned by the bank" is not poverty.
And you might find that even many of the rich (who have far more in assets than they have in debt or cash) will still have more debt than cash, because while investing on debt is generally considered stupid, investing on debt that could be fully cleared by the the object invested in (house/land) as collateral is the exception. People rich enough to buy houses for renting out rarely pay them in cash. The winners of inflation debt decay are not who you think they are.
I would think that the poor have no cash… that's why they're called "poor" after all.
The bottom 50% of income earners can barely cover the 'necessities' (housing, food, transportation, healthcare):
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...
They have contracts denominated in cash—for example, their wages from employment. That's where inflation tends to hurt the most since wages tend to trail behind inflation (or deflation). And of course being "poor" doesn't imply that you literally have zero savings, though you probably don't have enough to be worth the hassle and expense of a brokerage account to invest in stocks, ETFs, or mutual funds. For small amounts the transaction fees alone would be more than the gains.
Regarding the article you cited, it occurs to me that the authors never mentioned how long any given household remains in a particular category. If I took a year-long sabbatical from work, for example, then I would end up in that "lowest 20%" group with zero income while I lived off my savings, but that doesn't mean I'm experiencing any kind of financial difficulty. The same goes for students still receiving support from their parents, or for anyone who is retired and living off of a lifetime's worth of investments (though probably not pre-tax 401(k)/IRA, depending on the study methodology, since these distributions are generally considered "income" for tax purposes). "Lowest 20% by income" is not a fixed group. This is apparent simply from the fact that expenses cannot exceed income indefinitely; eventually you must either increase your income, at which point you are no longer counted in that statistic, or else decrease your expenses. But the idea of a shifting group of households which temporarily earn less than they spend paints a very different picture than the one the article implies.
The benefit is that if the creditors (mostly upper classes) refuse to forgive the debt then you don't need an angry mob with pitchforks to cancel the contract (revolution).
Yes, bigger down payments suck but that is mostly a zoning/housing supply issue.
Only higher than expected inflation helps debtors. Lower than expected inflation hurts debtors.
I'm not sure why you think Creditors would consistently underestimate inflation. Maybe they do, but why would they?
One thing I am sure of, is that when inflation expectations change a lot so that there is a lot of doubt as to what future inflation will be, then creditors charge a higher premium for that perceived increase in inflation risk. That hurts debtors.
No, they do not, because they typically only hold the note for a few days before it gets securitized and sold onto a market that is pinned by a very large, inflation-agnostic player: The Fed.
Now, we'll see what happens to this market if and when they begin to taper, but I think all the non-Fed players in this market remember what happened the last time they tried it, and they're all betting, correctly, that Powell will be forced into not only NOT tapering, but increasing purchases.
All of these markets: treasuries, mortgages, auto loans, and junk bonds, know for a fact that there will always be an artificially high bid for their toilet paper. Why would they care?
The creditor who will ultimately hold that paper has a very different outlook on inflation rates than I do, but I’m happy to take the loan, especially since a side-effect is having a place to live.
Such questions deserve answers.
There is a lot that I skipped over, not wanting to get into the weeds of economic theory and start more arguments about whether the Fed controls rates or whether markets do (orthodox theory says markets control real rates and the fed only controls nominal rates, and thus inflation), and how savings demands respond to interest rates, and whether mortgages are risk free rates or not.
All of that complicates the simple picture I painted, but I think that picture is basically correct.
Suffice it to say that in terms of risk-free rates, the creditor's alternative is to buy a TIPS -- inflation protected bond -- which currently yields -1%
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10YTIP
So we are living in a very low interest rate world right now.
Given that most likely your mortgage is government guaranteed (what mortgage isn't?) the entirety of the 3% you are paying is just as an inflation hedge plus some risk of pre-payment -- again, I have no idea what kind of points you have and the specific terms of the loan.
If inflation was believed to be zero, you could probably get the same mortgage for less than 1%, maybe even 0%.
We live in a world with very low real rates, but that does not mean that creditors don't take inflation risk into account.
TIPS have a yield that is referenced to the CPI (attempting to present a real yield), not a yield expressed in nominal dollars, so direct comparisons against mortgage rates (inherently nominal yield) are not very productive.
The close equivalent to the 30YR mortgage rate is either the 10-year Treasury (currently yielding ~+1.6%) or, if you insist on matching maturities, the 30-year (currently yielding ~+2.0%)
So, whatever risk premium the lender is demanding on a 0-points, 30-year fixed mortgage, it's a maximum of 1.4% (3.0%-1.6%). As a borrower, I'll happily take that deal.
that's canceled out by prices being higher because every other buyer has access to the same rates. Your monthly payments works out to be the same in the end because everybody bids up to the max they can afford.
Hard to predict, in general. Would you have predicted we’d be looking at 5% inflation right now, three years ago? We haven’t seen inflation like this in decades.
> That hurts debtors.
Only if they have variable-rate loans.
The broader point here is that it’s creditors (and the wealthy) who bemoan inflation the most because it means their rents are going to be worth less.
How? I'm pretty sure that is determined by the market. 10 year treasuries are yielding 1.587% which is less than inflation and people still buy them because your alternative is cash with even worse returns.
- lower middle class/poor: A cleaner working hand-to-mouth taking a payday loan isn't inflation hedging. She's paying through the nose for the privilege of a 33% loan because she's a risky debtor.
- middle class: I make money on my mortgage. I see my 1.22% 20 years fixed mortgage melt away against a salary that is raising with inflation. Plus I get rewarded by government with a tax deduction. Similar story for our rental.
- rich: Elon Musk can live off margin loans against a fraction of his investment portfolio if and when it makes sense.
The mortgage interest tax deduction only applies if you itemize, which literally 90% of people do not do as of 2019 IRS statistics. Effectively, there is no mortgage interest tax deduction for middle class since the 2017 tax cut ACA jobs act.
Wow, if you don't live in the US, where are you getting a 20 year fixed rate?
Honestly just curious as I thought those were really only a US thing.
Mind you, it's literally impossible to get evicted from your primary home here, which is presumably what drives the differences.
How does this work? Do they get a free house and a check cut monthly? Or is the mortgage cheaper than what it would have been?
Well:
> 2. How is the CPI market basket determined?
> The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2020 and 2021 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys for 2017 and 2018. In each of those years, about 24,000 consumers from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, another 12,000 consumers in each of these years kept diaries listing everything they bought during a 2-week period.
> Over the 2 year period, then, expenditure information came from approximately 24,000 weekly diaries and 48,000 quarterly interviews used to determine the importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.
* https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_2
The BLS' CPI isn't written on some set of secret scrolls. If you're curious about how it is configured just look it up.
The BLS isn’t hiding this information, it’s publicly available. The burden of proof would be on you to provide research on why that methodology is incorrect.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
> The CPIs are based on prices of food, clothing, shelter, fuels, transportation, doctors’ and dentists’ services, drugs, and other goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living. Prices are collected each month in 75 urban areas across the country from about 6,000 housing units and approximately 22,000 retail establishments (department stores, supermarkets, hospitals, filling stations, and other types of stores and service establishments). All taxes directly associated with the purchase and use of items are included in the index. Prices of fuels and a few other items are obtained every month in all 75 locations. Prices of most other commodities and services are collected every month in the three largest geographic areas and every other month in other areas. Prices of most goods and services are obtained by personal visits or telephone calls by the Bureau’s trained representatives.
A lot of people take issue with hedonic adjustments, substitution threshold, etc - but the specific methdology used is far less important than the fact that they're simply lying about the data.
For one example, the obvious elephant in the room is the shelter category. In the last year, rents are up 12%[1], and home prices have soared nearly 20%[2]
Yet, from your own source, the BLS is claiming 3.2% for the shelter category.
It's not so much that the methodology is wrong (although that argument could be made as well), but that they're flat out lying.
And then you have to contend with the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: if they're lying to your face about the shelter category, what makes you think the data in any of the other categories, for which you have less third party data to corroborate, are not also completely fabricated?
[1] https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/national-rent-data [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPISA
1) The rent data you cite is for new leases. Since new leases only represent a fraction of total leases, they aren't going to agree with tracking overall rent.
2) When you buy a house, you get two things: shelter and an investment asset. The inflation statistics are only interested in shelter, not investments, so they disaggregate them. They do this by computing the rent for an equivalent dwelling. For this reason, the home price index won't agree with the inflation statistics either.
> 1) The rent data you cite is for new leases. Since new leases only represent a fraction of total leases
The vast, vast plurality of residential leases are for 12 months - and the vast majority are for 6, 12, or 18 months. So no, you're flat out wrong, here. We're talking YoY numbers, so these values reset literally at the end of the timeframe we're discussing.
> 2) When you buy a house, you get two things: shelter and an investment asset.
Cool. Home ownership is at a multi-generational LOW in the United States, with a huge proportion of the HN demographic comprising those currently priced completely out of this market. The OER metric weighting is not updated frequently enough to sufficiently account for this fact.
The reality is that between shelter, fuel, and food, our cost of living is skyrocketing on the order of 12% per year, and the CPI understates this for obvious political reasons. The real yield on a 10y treasury is about -10%, so it's no wonder that obvious scams like AMC, JPEG NFTs, and Shiba Inu (the coin, not the breed) are so popular. You reach for yield any place you can.
The median person does not see a 20% increase in housing prices if they are not currently purchasing a home. I have a 30-year mortgage and my housing costs have not increased since I purchased it. Add in the 65% home ownership rate and it isn't out of question that a large portion of the country isn't seeing as much housing inflation in their actual budgets.
Your source for rentals looks at the cost of new leases. The BLS methodology looks at the most recent rent of a sample of units, regardless of when the rent was set.
We would expect your source to report a higher increase, because its methodology is more responsive to short term changes. That does not show that the BLS is lying.
I wonder if they're able to discount this because the low interest rates mean that monthly payments have not increased 20% for most mortgage borrowers.
What goods, what weights, what substitutions?
The government has done this work and open sourced their calculations. Your unwillingness to accept it isn't proof that it doesn't exist.
To illustrate my point, here is a piece of the "Item replacement and quality adjustment" methodology. I cut it off where the table starts: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/calculation.htm#item-replac...
>Item replacement and quality adjustment
One of the more difficult problems faced in compiling a price index is the accurate measurement and treatment of quality change due to changing product specifications and consumption patterns. The concept of the CPI requires a measurement through time of the cost of purchasing an unchanging, constant-quality set of goods and services. In reality, products disappear, products are replaced with new versions, and new products emerge.
When a data collector finds that he or she can no longer obtain a price for an item in the CPI sample (often because the outlet permanently stops selling it), the data collector uses the CPI item replacement procedure to find a new item. Each priced item stratum in the CPI contains one or more ELIs. CPI commodity analysts have developed checklists that define further subdivisions of each ELI. When seeking a replacement in a retail outlet, the data collector first uses the checklist for the ELI to find the item sold by the outlet that is the closest to the previously priced item. Then the data collector describes the replacement item on the checklist, capturing its important specifications. The CA assigned to the ELI reviews all replacements and selects one of three methods to adjust for quality change and to account for the change in item specifications.
The following example describes the most common type of quality adjustment problem. Assume that a data collector in period t tries to collect the price for item j in its assigned outlet and is not able to do so because the outlet no longer sells this item. (A price for item j was collected in period t–1.) The data collector then finds a replacement item and collects a price for it. This replacement item becomes the new version v+1 of item j. The commodity analyst decides how the CPI treats the replacement. The commodity analyst has the descriptions of the two versions of item j. In addition, he or she has the t–1 price, , for the earlier version v and the period t price, , of the replacement version v+1. The following matrix displays the information available to the commodity analyst:
The "basket of things" is made from the ratios of things consumers buy. BLS explains the methodology and lists the basket, and how it evolves as people buy less horse carriages and more cars, less giant radios and more iPhones, and so on.
Making a basket that better represents inflation would be worth a lot of money, and a lot of groups try, but none really do any better than the BLS.
For example, the Billion Prices Project out of MIT tracks a vastly larger number of things, but ends up with the same inflation rates http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/methods-overview.htm
Ever consider you are special? If you’re posting on this site, chances are you are more educated, richer, and better employed than most of your compatriots in whatever country you’re in. Of course luxury goods inflate faster. We can afford it.
My personal observation on the snacks I buy: they are the same volume and taste mostly the same, but the ingredients shifted over time, in particular relating to flavor (e.g. less sugar and more "sugary stuff")
BTW In parallel they introduced "rich" versions that are more "luxury", clearly distinct from the standard product, and contain better ingredients overall. I'd expect a number of people to have switched to the pricer version, even if they were really seeking the "old" standard version.
And sometimes the content is actually superior. A US$ 30K nowadays is generally much better than a similarly priced car from 10 or 20 years ago. The iPhone was released in the United States in 2007 at the price of $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for the 8 GB model: what kind of tech can you get for the same prices nowadays?
Everyone seems to ignore deflation, especially due to technology. This 1991 Radio Shack add illustrates the point quite well IMHO:
> There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
> So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
> * All weather personal stereo, [*US*]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
> * AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
> * In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
> * Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
> * Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
> * VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
> * Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
> * Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
> * 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
> * Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
> * 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
> * Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
> * Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
> * BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
> You’d have spent $3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone.
* https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973
That US$1600 Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...
What kind of system can you get for $1600 nowadays?
But well, you have to buy that phone eventually, right? So you take the best deal you can find, and stop worrying about it. That's the only sane way.
So in general - customers will delay purchases until the reasons they want to make the purchase outweigh the expected savings from delaying further.
I've also found the reverse to apply: for example, taking out a mortgage, I opted not to hurry despite fast-rising prices, because I judged the money saved on doing it earlier would not offset the mental cost of adding a house searching and mortgage process on top of two other highly-taxing life events.
The Osborne effect is a social phenomenon of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current, soon-to-be-obsolete product as an unexpected drawback of a company's announcing a future product prematurely. The term was coined in reference to the Osborne Computer Corporation, a company that took more than a year to make its next product available, and eventually went bankrupt in 1983.
That $1600 Tandy would equate to ~$3250 in Today's day and age.
So, essentially an M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pro.
I bought my 2003 VW Golf brand new from the dealer for CA$ 30K all-in, and after inflation that's the equivalent of about CA$ 40K nowadays. I'd get a pretty good car with much better tech and safety even for $30K, and could get something relatively fancy for $40K.
For example, you could argue that no one is harmed by Google's near-monopoly on search because consumer prices aren't going up (it's still free!). But if you consider data collected and time wasted scrolling past ads Google's services have been getting steadily more expensive for years.
Of course measuring these costs in an consistent, objective way is extremely difficult :(
Doesn't this sort of assume that the needs and wants of society stay consistent over time? I wonder if that is a valid assumption with how fast the world changes these days. For example, smartphones were hardly necessary 10 years ago, but now everyone needs one. And modes of transportation have changed: now we have Uber and a large number of electric cars, which wasn't the case 10 years ago. How could an index that includes things like the price of gas be an accurate measure, if society's needs are constantly in flux?
The basket can and does get adjusted.
For Canadians, StatCan has a "personal inflation" calculator where you can enter your own bills for their own basket of goods and services and get a personal number:
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...
If people are ordering the same groceries then we should be able to make our own regional data plots.
We dont need the government for this. They need us to support them. And right now thats just this decade long debate about CPI and inflation, which is now accelerating due to the currency supply shock over the last year as people are converted into paying attention to this discussion.
I don’t care what a farrier charges to reshoe a horse or what a block of icebox ice costs, but I might have only 100 years ago. Surely we’d need a way to include entertainment and lifestyle changes as they happen. 1973 CPI didn’t include any costs for personal computers, Internet service, mobile phones, etc.
Also, consider that inflation numbers are necessarily lagging reality; they're not updated live by tracking residents or anything like that. For example, september's numbers are available and quoted above, but October's are not (and are projected to be higher).
This kind of conspiratorial thinking is harmful; it reduces trust, and thereby encourages everybody to skimp on the rules making everybody worse off. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma - we're better off just not playing that game. I'm sure the process of inflation-computation is imperfect, but let's talk about concrete, verifiable problems or better yet suggestions for improvements instead of nebulous feelings of disagreement.
By the looks of it, the official statistics confirm that inflation is spiking, but simply not yet to dramatic numbers (i.e. the kind of numbers that instantly change how we all think about money). If you feel that inflation is significantly higher, then why?
I'm searching that number and I can't find anything.
I found this, which is comparing the same quantities and has five pounds of meat. https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1410709115333234691
There's a bunch of complaints about other prices, and people pointing out the prices are up 8% since 2019, but I don't see anything about "cutting out all the meat" and I don't see the number 49 anywhere.
And the ground beef had the second biggest percent drop in price in that list, anyway.
Secondly, to somehow think 16 cents -- in the middle of a pandemic -- is worth a high-five, a bunch of jokes, and evidence that "the Biden economic plan is working" (what economic plan? nothing has passed yet), just shows that this administration is absolutely tone-deaf when it comes to the people it supposedly represents.
I think a mere "it hasn't gone up" would be a reasonable thing to be happy about among all the inflation. I wouldn't say "the Biden economic plan is working" about it but I feel like the criticism went to unreasonable places.
It's funny because the actual quote is stupid enough -- trying to emphasize some marginal rounding error national savings on 5 pounds of meat when the entire world has been exploded for the last two years is a baffling claim and an obvious attempt to put lipstick on the whole situation, these guys are absolute clowns, and the April-onwards hubris of "COVID's over, we saved the day!!!" is just a national embarrassment.
The specific "ban meat" bugbear has been a very active talking point among conservatives. You see, the Green New Deal (which is predicted in the book of Revelation) involves Andrea McDonald-Cortisol personally banning you from eating meat.
The ground truth at the heart of it is that the Green New Deal, which is as much an expression of intent as it is an actual policy document, correctly notes that cattle raised for beef contribute to greenhouse gasses (both through methane production, CO2 production, and clear-cutting of valuable carbon sinks to produce grazeland). This is of course indisputably true. The document doesn't actually prescribe any restrictions on meat so much as it acknowledges that the size of meat's contribution to our climate economics makes it unlikely we'll hit long term targets without rethinking our relationship with meat. Compound that with the fact that some liberals, including Barack Hussein Obama's awful wife!!!!, did initiatives like a "meatless monday", and you have all the proof you need that liberals are banning your meat.
It is less clear to me who is the first particular commentator to combine the "Biden is going to ban meat (and guns, and god, and everything else you hold dear, which is not a surprise because he stole the election, and he's senile)" argument and the "Biden claimed the 4th of July will be cheaper which is false because we have Zimbabwe level inflation" argument.
A few random sources of very concerned RW commentators talking about liberals taking away your meat, all before the present controversy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/01/latest-righ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/26/republicans...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/26/politics/fact-check-biden...
Funny enough, I just noticed that your sources are liberals dunking on conservatives. Oh dear, this is as far deep down the partisan insanity of contemporary US discourse as I'm willing to go.
No where did I say I thought Biden was taking away my meats (smoked or otherwise), I’m not really sure how to respond to any of the other lies you posted about me but to call them outright lies that shouldn’t be part of any civil conversation between two human beings that don’t know each other. It strikes me that you came up with a conspiracy about me to lampoon right wing conspiracy theorists. Who really is more ready to believe lies?