Hacker News Reader

Comment by verteu | Hacker News Reader

But the median wage is up 40% in the last 15 years... If your pay has been constant, you're getting salary decreases in real terms.

View on HN

That's great, but how much has the price of housing, food, cars, energy, and a college education increased during that time frame?

My other comment in this thread compares the growth of CPI and wages (wages grew faster).

CPI doesn’t properly account for these factors that I mentioned.

CPI includes housing, food, cars, & energy.

You're welcome to check an alternate metric (eg Truflation), but they're all quite similar to CPI.

A simple Google search will give you an obvious result: “Spending to purchase and improve houses and other housing units is treated as investment and not consumption in the CPI.”

You are welcome.

Right, that's covered by "owner's equivalent rent." This is LOWER than what homeowners actually pay. (Think about it -- Do landlords make negative `profit = home_payment_expenses - rent`?)

Any why would GGP mention food, cars, and energy? They are directly included in the CPI. I think it's more likely that GGP is under the false impression that these items are excluded from the CPI -- It's a conspiracy theory originating from economists' practice of using "CPI Excluding Food, Shelter, Energy, and Used Cars and Trucks" as a lower-variance estimate of the future inflation rate.

> You are welcome.

Skip the snark, it's against HN guidelines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com