Measuring Inflation By William Cate Knowing inflation rate for your business or family is vital to your long term financial planning. Thanks to Federal Reserve in Minneapolis, it's now possible for you to easily develop an individual inflation meter. Also, it allows you to prove to yourself that Government is lying about inflation rate.
The U.S. Department of Labor reports Consumer Price Index (CPI). The Government wants you to believe that CPI is U.S. inflation rate. It isn't. Like many Government and industry statistical indexes, it is intentionally misleading. The purpose of CPI is to under report U.S. inflation rate. The CPI rate is used to adjust Social Security payments and real inflation rate would be very costly to Government. Consumers relying on CPI mistakenly have a more favorable view of country's economic future and buy more goods and services, thus creating more jobs and helping ensure economic illusion will continue longer.
The Government's primary statistical method for under reporting U.S. inflation rate is to carefully select components that make up CPI. The Government chooses items that aren't responding to inflation. An example would be that single family residents were used as housing component until house prices started to move upward rapidly over a decade ago. Then, Government switched to cost of a single-family rental unit, which wasn't moving up quickly. The steady rental rates are in part due to local government rent ceiling ordinances.
Until last year, gasoline prices at pump were well below annual CPI rate and were used as energy component. The reason that gasoline price was low was that our friends in Saudi Arabia were willing to sell oil to us without adjusting price to real inflation of U.S. Dollar.
It's easy to find items whose price hasn't adjusted by inflation rate. Phone costs have declined in past decade, due to competition and PC prices remain constant, etc. The Government's secondary method is to have a statistical formula with a strong downward bias as result.
The Rule of Thumb in American business and financial community is to take CPI and double it to get an approximate real inflation rate. Fiscal conservatives argue it should be tripled.
Someone at Federal Reserve in Minneapolis developed a calculator based upon CPI. [http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/research/data/us/calc/] It allows you to determine factor needed to adjust prices for any year, starting in 1913. If you want to determine CPI adjusted price for an item in 1913 with same item in 2005, you'll find that you should factor 1913 price by 19.8. As a byproduct of where I dined during my college years, I know that a steak dinner in a middle class St. Louis, Missouri restaurant was $0.25 in 1913. The restaurant had its original menu on wall. Based upon CPI that steak dinner should cost $4.93 today. I'll bet you can't get a decent steak dinner in St. Louis for less than $10.00 now. I know that I can't get one for less than $20.00 in San Francisco Bay Area.