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Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.
This fraud is revealed when the same discounting principle isn't applied to, say, GDP, or other "good numbers". Oh yes, you bet your ass the extra dollars get counted there. With this neat trick, you get to double, triple, maybe even quadruple count the benefits of a technology or innovation.
Things in the past were going well enough for the common man that there wasn't much to notice here, but now that John Everyman is getting squeezed from all angles, the official numbers are starting to look suspicious. Hard to ignore the dissonance when your typical bag of groceries jumps 20% and the official numbers are still like "3% :)". Becomes clear that the numbers aren't about you or people like you. There's so much witchcraft that goes into these numbers anyway that they are essentially a matter of interpretation rather than fact, and it's becoming clear to a lot of people that it's a picture painted by a club they're not in. And yeah, I guess if you're an upperclassman like Scott is now, it's easy to believe everything's great. But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.
It's actually difficult for me to believe the level of condescension that these people are speaking to the working class. I couldn't imagine biting the hand that feeds me that hard. Maybe we need a little bit of rising Bolshevism to remind these people who actually runs the place.
Inflation is supposed to compare like-for-like. You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.
Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon
Cool, so base the numbers on comparing like goods and stop fucking with them. How is a bureaucrat supposed to measure how much more better the Philly Cheese-steak is? This also doesn't solve the double counting problem. The BLT doesn't count for less dollars in the GDP line go up so shut up data.
EDIT: It also doesn't solve the problem that, in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed.
Unfortunately, you cannot eat or live in gas.
Buddy, you can't tell people to shut up.
Yes. This is a problem on the regulatory side. And I'm very sympathetic to the claim that a given regulation (say, for backup cameras or whatever) has an unfavorable cost/benefit ratio -- in many cases it's absolutely true. So it's completely valid to say that shitty regulation makes things more expensive, but that isn't inflation.
I think he is saying that the economists are telling the data to go away and stop bothering them, not telling you to shut up.
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