Tucker Carlson does his usual excellent job of explaining democrat madness

from Fox News – Dec 11, 2021 – condensed and edited for brevity

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 definitely been doing that. 

In fact, there’s only one accurate way to measure inflation, and somehow the Fed has not yet figured this out. Here it is: You ask yourself, what does it cost you to live in this country compared to what it cost you a year ago? It’s not complicated. Do the math, and you will see that the actual number, the rise in inflation is not even close to the seven percent that Washington is claiming. 

In the last year, the price of a used car, for example, is going up by more than 30%. Beef prices have risen by 21%. Crude oil up 55%. Dimensional lumber, 35%. Wheat, 37%. Sugar, 33%. Corn, 39%. Palm Oil, 43%. Do you drink coffee in the morning, ever? Oh, too bad. The price of coffee has risen 108% in the last year. Do you like breakfast cereal? Oh, sorry. Oats are up 114%. 

And those are just the numbers you see on the label at the grocery store. In addition to conventional inflation, consumers also face widespread shrinkflation. That’s an informal term that economists use for the stealth shrinking of consumer products. So companies sell you less for the same price. Have you bought a Snickers bar recently? If it seems a lot smaller than it used to, that’s because it is.