The Glade 4.0

Corn, cotton, beans, silver, gold, copper.

Take your freaking pick Xeq.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

What's your point? I could just as easily point to real estate prices and claim we are suffering massive deflation. If you're going to claim the BLS is outright lying then you need to show this. Everyone simply claims "they don't count food and energy because they're trying to trick us" and it's easily demonstrated that this is not true.

In my personal opinion there is significant inflation, it's just being masked by the fact that real estate prices are crashing so hard. That still doesn't mean the BLS is lying though, as real estate does get counted.

Yes, of course the Fed looks at food and energy. They talk about it all the time. They just don't include it in their core inflation numbers, and for good reason.

Food and oil are extremely volatile, and often for reasons that are outside of Fed policy control. For example, Libyans protest, oil skyrockets. OPEC produces more oil, prices drop. Hurricane hits Kansas, corn prices skyrocket.

By including oil and food, which are enormous portions of the economy, "inflation" would be at the mercy of such unpredictable factors, and subject to huge swings. This would make the whole concept useless, from a policy perspective.

So yes, they look at these items, but they also look at everything else with these items excluded.

For good reason.

Arathain:

It's not for good reason, because follow a fairly stable inflation pattern of their own in the United States. Indeed, given supply and demand, you can be 100% certain that government action is responsible for increasing food costs, as the United States produces more food than it needs at least an order of magnitude. Oil and Energy costs are so regulated that any actual market pressures and fluctuations are minor compared to the taxes and regulatory fees on the items in question.

But, you know, the guy with degrees in economics apparently doesn't know enough about economics to be 100% certain that the government is lying about inflation or convinced you all that food and energy are so volatile they don't provide useful information.

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No, it really isn't because you guys keep forgetting how much regulatory skewing in consumer costs already takes place in both markets. Nearly 70% of the cost of gasoline is taxes in the BEST states in America. It's higher in those places driving the national average near $4.00 a gallon. God forbid we look at how much electricity and other energy costs are shifted out of normal supply and demand curves by regulatory activity.

But, yeah, inflation is in the 20% range, especially when you start factoring in the declining real value of our currency. It's pretty shitty.

But, you know, it's heresy to say a government lies to protect its power base in the U.S.

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Apparently not. I don't trust anyone who's 100% certain of anything, because in my experience they're either full of **** or don't know what they are talking about.

At any rate, regardless of the cause, oil and food prices do swing wildly (often together). Wild swings are not useful for short-term policy decisions.

Are you seriously claiming that the majority of states have somehow secretly increased gasoline taxes by an average of 20% in the past year, nobody has noticed, and every major news organization is complicit in this fraud by attributing the increases to speculators and/or market forces? Because if 70% of the cost is taxes, I don't see any other way the price could go up by 20%.

Can you please show your work on these claims (preferably in a form understandable by educated laypeople)?