Americans learned from the latest Consumer Price Index report just days ago that inflation is at 6.8%, meaning workers with less than a 6.8% increase in their income are losing ground, unable to pay for the same things they did a year ago.
If only it were that good, warns Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
“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%,” he said.
“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.”
He explained, “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.”
He noted the price of gasoline is less than 4% of the value of the CPI products.
“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,” he said. “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. ”
He pointed out Biden administration officials for a long time claimed inflation was “transitory,” but now they’ve stopped using that term.
He said the reality isn’t complicated.
“You ask yourself, what does it cost you to live in this country compared to what it cost you a year ago? … 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.”
He cited one West Coast rental community, where living units that went for $800 a year ago now are renting for $2,600.
“Oh, so tell us again, Joe Biden, how inflation is at seven percent. Read some more government numbers to us,” Carlson said.
Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, agreed.
“We are going to be hit with a tsunami of inflation in this country,” Schiff said.
Schiff told Fox that the CPI actually had changed its variables over the years, and if the U.S. was now using the same as that used in 1980, the inflation would be the highest on record.
He said, “Because the government, Wall Street, the federal reserve has a vested interest in the public not understanding how bad inflation is. In fact, 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, but the only reason we didn’t have enough of it is because they were relying on their own highly rigged CPI.
“You know, the CPI was not always this dishonest. You know, when they compare our inflation rates to the inflation of the 1970s, we are not using the same CPI that we used then.
“The annualized rate of inflation so far according to the CPI for 2021 is 7.3, if you annualize the first 11 months. That’s the worst rate since 1982. But if we were using the same CPI as we used in 1982, the rate would be closer to 15 percent, which means it is the worst year in inflation in U.S. history because the highest one year was 1980 when it was 13.5 percent and this year, it is more than that.”
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