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Comment by euph0ria | Hacker News Reader

Edit: Read counter-arguments in comments to this below.

And shadowstats.com puts it to 17.15%:

March 2022 CPI-U annual inflation hit a 40-plus year high of 8.54% [up from 7.87% in February], the steepest inflation pace since December 1981; March 2022 ShadowStats “Corrected” Alternate CPI estimate hit 17.15%, up from 16.05% in February], the steepest inflation rate since June 1947 (in 75 years).

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Shadowstats is completely worthless. They literally just added a fixed 5% to the actual CPI numbers over the entire period without any justification. If you took their average inflation rate to any commodity over the period they claim, the price would be about 10X higher than it is. It's a tinfoil hat conspiracy site.

Just eyeballing the ShadowStats chart (because accessing the raw data requires a subscription), they're claiming that the inflation rate has been hovering around 8% since roughly the year 2000. That implies that the cost of living in the US has increased over 5x since 2000.

At least in the bay, it kind of has if you include housing... 2000 was a low point and we're at a high point now.

If you deflate nominal GDP with shadowstats numbers, you'll find that GDP has been continually dropping for the last few decades. That seems hard to believe.

How does Shadowstats calculate it differently: http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-438-public-comment-on-...

Counter-arguments: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowstats.com#:~:text=A%20....

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