Fox News: This is what inflation really is in the United States

Article by Tucker Carlson in Fox News

There's a lot about modern economic theory that's important but difficult to understand. In fact, many people formulating these theories don't really understand them, and that's why they can never explain anything clearly. But there is one core economic fact that everybody, even those of us with poor math skills, grasps instantly, and that's when we're getting poorer. How do you know when you're getting poor? You know you're getting poor when you don't have enough money to do the things that you once did. You are moving backward. It is a very scary feeling. Short of armed robbery. Nothing makes Americans poorer faster than inflation does. Now, finance moguls who borrow money for a living love inflation. It makes their debt cheaper. It's a good thing for them, but everyone else hates it because it crushes them in ways that are very obvious day to day.

So with that in mind, the new inflation numbers are out and they're the worst this country has seen in nearly 40 years. According to the Consumer Price Index, inflation is up almost seven percent over the past 12 months. It's very high. The problem is the reality is much worse than that, and that's because the consumer index is useless as a guide to life in America, it doesn't actually measure the cost of living. In that way, it is a lie. It's a rigged government number one of many. Now, the CPI is calculated by assigning relative weight to different categories of goods. It's a very complex series of formulas. Some of them were formulated in good faith. Others were designed to deceive you. But in effect, the bottom line is, the CPI does a very bad job of measuring how much it actually costs to live in this country. 

For example, gas prices in the CPI. Gas prices constitute less than four percent of the total value of the products included. Now that's realistic if you happen to live in, say, Manhattan where pretty much nobody drives a car. But if you have a car and you drive more than a few miles to work every day, that's ridiculous because, for you, gas prices are a far larger part of your budget. And yet all of this is ignored by the CPI. 

You don't need to be an economist to understand this. The bottom line is these are not accurate numbers. But they were put together by people who we consider very smart, so you have to ask yourself, why are these numbers inaccurate? Think about it. 

The consumer price index measures the downside of federal economic policy. So let's say you printed too many U.S. dollars. You wanted to fund useless programs and pay off your donors. Now, if you did that, you would devalue your own currency. You would cause inflation over time. You would impoverish your own population. Those would be the effects. But of course, you would want to hide those effects. You instead want to tell everybody that thanks to you, the economy is great, and the consumer price index allows politicians to do that. 

The CPI allows reckless, economically illiterate leaders to hide the mess they have made. It's a conflict of interest, if there ever was one, it's like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the audit committee. What do you think's going to happen if you do that? Fake numbers allow fake economists to tell a fake story about what's actually happening to the country. And they've .......

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