“Officially” is a funny word. Officially, China’s constitution guarantees freedom of speech and religion. Officially, homosexuality is outlawed under Islam (but loopholes exist). Here’s another example:
Officially, our Consumer Price Index (CPI — what’s informally called “inflation”) rose 7.3 percent this year — or 6.9 percent, depending on whom you believe. This would make it the highest in 39 years. Banking on this, however, would be a bit like assuming you could mount a soapbox in Shanghai, call Xi Jinping a traitor, and not end up “re-educated.”
For in fact, says one analyst, the real 2021 CPI is 15 percent — the highest in American history.
Indications are that it’s going to get worse, too.
This bad news was delivered by economist Peter Schiff while appearing on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight Friday evening. The issue, said Schiff, is that how we calculate the CPI has changed. A more honest formula, the one we used 39 years ago, yields the record CPI figure.
Before Schiff appeared on the Fox program, host Tucker Carlson painted a dark but accurate economic picture, saying:
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.
… So with that in mind, the new inflation numbers are out and they’re the worst this country has seen in nearly 40 years…. 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…. In that way, it is a lie.
… 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 constitute less than four percent of the total value of the products included [in the CPI]. 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.
Why the deception? As Carlson explained:
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.
Of course, you’d have to have been asleep as long as Rip Van Winkle to be surprised that the government is lying (again). As to the truth, in the last year, the price of a used car has gone up “by more than 30 percent,” related Carlson, providing examples. “Beef prices have risen by 21 percent; crude oil up 55 percent; dimensional lumber, 35 percent; wheat, 37 percent; sugar, 33 percent; corn, 39 percent; palm oil, 43 percent.”
“Do you drink coffee in the morning, ever? Oh, too bad,” Carlson continued. “The price of coffee has risen 108 percent in the last year. Do you like breakfast cereal? Oh, sorry. Oats are up 114 percent” (video below).
After the above segment, Schiff appeared and further explained CPI subterfuge. One “of the ways the Fed has been able to justify creating more inflation is because they claimed we didn’t have enough of it,” he said. “But the only reason we didn’t have enough of it is because they were relying on their own highly rigged CPI.”
“When they compare our inflation rates to the inflation of the 1970s, we’re not using the same CPI that we used then,” Schiff also stated. He then said that the CPI-based 2021 annualized rate of inflation stands at 7.3 percent.
Yet if “we were using the same CPI we used in 1982, the rate would be closer to 15%, which means it’s the worst year in inflation in US history” (video below), he continued. Under the more honest formula in 1980, the CPI was the previous record of 13.5 percent.
This is largely if not completely caused by actual inflation (of the currency), our legalized-counterfeiting-operation government’s printing of dollars backed by nothing. Outrageous about this is that it’s pursued because it allows statists (mainly Democrats) to fund massive spending without officially raising taxes. But it’s a hidden form of taxation because it dilutes the value of the greenbacks in your pocket. It’s supply and demand: The more you create of something, the less it’s worth, all other things being equal.
Thus, legalized counterfeiting hurts responsible Americans who save money — the “average citizens” the pseudo-elites look down on — all to benefit profligates who assume massive debt (such as the federal government).
Schiff also mentioned that our productivity numbers are collapsing, which means that not only are more dollars in circulation, but they’re chasing fewer goods. That’s how you explode prices.
Schiff further stated that the dollar will eventually collapse and the United States will become the “epicenter” of a currency and sovereign debt crisis that will make 2008’s financial crisis “look like a Sunday school picnic.”
Of course, you can bet that when this happens, the pseudo-elites will be partying on — unless we can somehow hold them accountable.
