Only economists, policy makers, investors and people blabbing on the internet do care about stats.

Ordinary people just look at price tags; that's all they need.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-us-inflation-ra...

The purchasing power of Gold has been remarkably consistent over the long term.

That is, if you convert the gold to dollars, how many eggs could you buy?

To learn more, read up on the work of Keith Weiner of Monetary Metals, or listen to the early episodes of his podcast “The Gold Exchange”.

https://archive.is/xzohV

The domain name here isn't really driving the comments or content that I can tell.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard the idea that success in free market capitalism comes from offering goods and services to customers with the right balance between quality and price, and that good quality and price is assured because of competition in the market.

But now I see that the true path to success is to first gain favor from those who already have wealth and power, and then use their wealth and power to reduce or eliminate competition.

The more significant concern it seems to me is the rate of increase. Nearly a full percentage point in a month seems like a lot, but I'm no expert.

And then headline figure PPI was even higher at 0.9% for the month, 3.3% year.

The public was so incensed that they threw out the government.

> The producer price index increased 0.9% from a month earlier, the largest advance since consumer inflation peaked in June 2022, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report out Thursday

* https://www.federalreserve.gov/economy-at-a-glance-inflation...

* https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

The fed argues that, If inflation expectations fall, interest rates would decline too. In turn, there would be less room to cut interest rates to boost employment during an economic downturn.

this economics explanation feels like gaslighting every time i hear the fed mention it. the reserve literally pushed negative rates and quantitative easing for so long that people came to expect prosperity as a feature of the economic framework of the nation, and now that we have rampant inflation that cannot be controlled by normal means (prime rate) the fed somehow wants us all to understand its our fault for enjoying affordable burger meat.

Being off by 40% is cause for alarm in almost any circumstance.

Before someone decides to try and explaining to me that tariffs will bring back work to the US and help our economy, I just need to say that is orthogonal to the point of inflation. It's possible that the tariffs will be a net good. I don't think they will but at least that's something that's on the table, but they will absolutely not lead to lower prices. If it were cheaper to manufacture goods in the US then we'd already be manufacturing goods in the US.

This is false on its face. Inflation has been a problem for years.

I want to believe but I'm fear fatigued to the point I just have no fear left to give

Ofc one can always say that No this is not the academic way to define inflation, but who cares?

The public in general can be really bad at perceiving the truth. I might take note of people's feelings to go and recheck something but I would not trust peoples feelings with stuff like this to make any sort of conclusion.

Verifiable metrics* are the only way to get any sort of objective handle on this.

* Edit: I replied below that I should have said verifiable metrics and context with discussion. Verifiable metrics are necessary but not sufficient.

Food prices go up because of random weather events (or locus or disease). USA beef prices are skyrocketing because of some new disease for example.

Anyone who says that a monthly food price change is an underlying indicator of overall inflation is simply lying to you.

Unless you’re implying special credentials should be required to comment.

Those statements aren't contradictory. Pricing in non-commodity goods is always a human phenomenon, driven ultimately by the idea that a business can 'get away with it' without losing too many customers to competitors.

Tariffs, on the other hand, provide a good reason/excuse to raise prices. Affected firms see their cost structures blown up, so they have to raise prices at least somewhat. Unaffected firms see that their competitors are raising / must raise prices, so they know that they can raise their own prices in the now less-competitive market. That's how and why tariffs work: they give domestic firms protection to have profits in excess of what they would have under a free trade counterfactual.

Any argument that tariffs don't raise prices is a very long-term one, relying on the idea that it will be easy to open new firms and expand domestic production to ultimately return to a competitive market. This has nearly no effect on short-term pricing, and it's why the least-damaging changes to tariff policies are long-run and well-telegraphed plans, slowly implemented.

Try going on a shareholder earnings call. They're free. It's company executives trying to impress shareholders. It's the only place I've ever heard people brag about how much they've raised their prices.

After all, total profit = sales margin * sales volume. You can increase your profit by increasing your volume because you kept your prices unchanged while your competitors decided to increase prices.

And since this is super low qualy, there should be an additional markup of 30-50%

  Tariffs
  Price gouging and folks continuing to pay
  Lack of alternatives - have a garden? Know how to work on a car? Etc. 
  Genuine competition for resources around the world and increased demand for those resources

Without linking the blogs or articles it’s hard to say much.

Inflation is a topic that attracts a lot of quackery. There are a lot of blogs and websites that go viral from time to time with claims that the “true” inflation number is dramatically higher.

There is a quick reality check you should run whenever you encounter these claims: Take the claimed inflation number over a period of time and calculate the net multiple. Then run a reality check on something like a $500,000 house or a $5 hamburger.

There’s one prolific website and author who claims the “true” inflation rate is some number like 11% going back decades. If you do the math, that means something purchased 50 years ago in 1975 would cost 185 times less. A $1,000,000 home today would have been $5,400 in 1975 and a $5 hamburger today would have been less than $0.03. Obviously these numbers don’t work, so you can discard the author’s claim.

Actual inflation numbers over long periods are very sensitive to small changes due to compounding. Even over a 10 year period. When you see someone claiming dramatically different results, run a quick math check.

Also be careful for the cherry pickers: They’ll identify one or two outlier year-over-year jumps (eggs during COVID, home prices during a housing rush, insurance prices in a city after a fire) and try to use those as their basis.

This is why the defense budget is never cut. By anyone red or blue. It's a funnel of money that can be pointed at any location in the US and give a bunch of decent full benefits jobs.

Your question at the end suggests those blogs and articles didn’t include compelling evidence for the case they were making. If true, then it is worth reconsidering whether it makes sense to incorporate into your world view.

Do you mean the other way around? The EU headline inflation rate doesn't include costs of owning a home like the US' does (owner's equivalent rent), which, as you might have guessed if you have ever wanted to own a home, is a component that has been quite inflationary, at least as far as recent memory goes. Or maybe those blogs were talking about some point a long time ago when that component pulled the US figures down (e.g. during the last housing crash)? What specific details did they give?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST#

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0

I’m driving, it’s difficult to put them on the same chart and normalize. But they are very similar. There are differences in methodology (housing, healthcare) but those generally add a small amount to US inflation chained index vs HICP.

Being from Europe, I wish. But for now, it doesn't seem to be the case. Your military power basically allows you to bully Europe and many others, tell us what to buy and whom to buy it from, which is an enormous economic advantage. You just made our puny European leaders promise an enormous investment in the US defense industry in the moment where we would need to propel our own industry the most (it probably won't materialize, but still, we'll spend at least some of it because most of our leaders don't want to be in a bad standing with the US). You are also bullying us into signing contracts with inferior American suppliers rather than Huawei, among many other things. All of this happens mainly due to the US's disproportionate military power. Meanwhile, you can afford having a president who is borderline illiterate (and actually makes binding decisions) without the economy even meaningfully sinking (stocks at historical maximums).

So spending in the military seems to actually be a good choice, unfortunately.

I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.

"balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc."

Spending does not equal outcomes. There doesn't need to be a spending balance, but there should be an outcomes balance. We can see this with school funding. There are some schools that are underfunded and underperform, but there are also schools with adequate funding that underperform lower funded schools. The implication that you are making is that we could fix things just by cutting back military spending. However, we are also leaders in some of the areas you mention already, such as R&D. The Pentagon fails their audits frequently and should be trimmed down in areas that it makes sense. However, just shifting that money to education isn't going to make that much of an impact.

Stipulating that they don't get eaten by their bigger neighbors. We're going to miss the Pax Americana.

It may impact inflation but you seem to be claiming debt is a component of inflation calculation, when inflation is little more than the change in prices.

Just not a very good comment in my view.

It's like the traditional view on GDP growth. Be a little slower than a similar country (say 0.5% a year) wait 20 years, and your formerly similar neighbor now sees your country as quite poor.

Win what exactly?

This is a common claim but I don't think it's supported. Defense spending is about 3.3% of GDP [0]. 15 years ago it was 4.9%, 40 years ago it was 6.45%, and it hit almost 10% in 1967 during peak spending in the Vietnam war. World War 2 made it around 35%. Also, what does unreported mean? Are you claiming that there is a significant amount of money being spent that isn't part of the reported military budget? How much? Defense spending was about 13% of the government budget in 2024 [1].

> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.

How much do those cost? I understand the claim is a lot, but how much? If you don't know, why pick this as an example?

> Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.

Defense stocks have not performed better relative to the Dow Jones. Raytheon stock has increased 5-fold since 1985 while the Dow has increased 33-fold over the same period. If defense was easy money, you'd see hedge funds loading up on it year on year. These companies aren't valued that much. Raytheon is valued at 208B [2], which is less than McDonalds, Nestle, T-Mobile, AMD, Home Depot, and Costco individually.

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.

I agree with this, but given that America only spends 13% of the budget on the department of defense, your own claim is claiming an American win. In 2021 the American Rescue Plan induced a giant amount of domestic welfare spending plans such as almost doubling the child tax credit. This was a tremendously expensive plan that cut child poverty in half, but people didn't feel strongly enough to successfully pressure politicians to keep it, which does seem pretty frustrating to me.

Also, I see you're using AI for sources below. Feed your comment into GPT 5 thinking and ask for an opinion, because it apparently thinks your inflation claim is completely reversed.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Ask Ukraine how that worked out for them. While your at it, tell the Baltics they should focus on society and not the Russian world that is coming for them.