Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Not including food or energy (same thing, really) in the inflation number would be a good way to start.
Hence, The Atlantic featuring chin-scratching economists baffled by why the commoners won’t believe Biden’s economy is akshually fantastic (with the deeply insightful conclusion being huh, it turns out they’re concerned with exactly the thing we factored out of our metric).
I’m confused by your logic here.
That article and the public sentiment they analyze clearly shows inflation isn’t being hidden. They even cite the inflation number for food, which was considerably higher than average.
There’s more than one inflation number and any average is going to have its issues, but there are sub indexes for food and energy.
I’m aware of the debate over the best way to calculate the CPI, but competing claims as expressed here are still within a few points of each other.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp
This debate is all publicly available information so how would the government hide if it were really trying to downplay inflation high enough to keep SS afloat?
Everyone has to buy food, energy, and shelter.
Everything else is optional. If those three things have a higher-than-average inflation rate, and they do (the asset price bubble doesn't help with respect to shelter, of course), the politically-active citizens are much more likely to notice and complain, have a common nucleation point around which to complain, and most importantly can reclaim the moral high ground of "making things more expensive than they need to be is anti-poor" and in so doing split the lower class against the upper (which is one place where the normal strategy of "high and low against the middle" fails).
The trick about artificially making things more expensive is that it doesn't come without cost, the people doing the artificial increases have already leveraged all of their socioeconomic credit, can't pay the interest on the exercise of that power, and their social credit has been downgraded as a consequence.
Wait, you think we have an asset bubble for housing? Where?
Who is engineering the high inflation for specifically food/energy/shelter to drive class warfare and how are they doing that?
I do not follow your last paragraph because I don’t know who these people are or what you mean about what they’re doing and what it costs.
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