The figures are from
shadowstats.com. John Williams tries to calculate unemployment, price inflation, GDP, and other economic indices the way they were calculated in the mid-1970s.
Price inflation, for example, has been systematically corrupted by "hedonic adjustments" and many other tricks. If the price of steak goes up, but hamburger is cheap, the adjustments assume you switch to hamburger so you don't spend any more on food, and voila! there is no inflation. After hamburger gets expensive you switch to chicken. Once chicken gets expensive, you switch to cat food, and so forth. If it weren't for the generous subsidies for grains and sugars, reducing the prices of processed foods, a lot more old folks would be starving. It's cheaper and less obvious to kill them with diabetes, cancer, and heart disease from poisoned food.
This was done quite deliberately; social security payments are indexed to the CPI index. By systematically under-reporting price inflation, the government robbed tens of millions of retirees of the money they had been promised, forcing a reduced standard of living. The reduced payments enabled prolonging the Ponzi scheme for another decade or two.
I'm not making this up. Williams has a
large section of primers.Consumer Price Index Has Been Reconfigured Since Early-1980s So As to Understate Inflation versus Common Experience
* CPI no longer measures the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living.
* CPI no longer measures full inflation for out-of-pocket expenditures.
* With the misused cover of academic theory, politicians forced significant underreporting of official inflation, so as to cut annual cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security, etc.
* Politicians look to expand further the concept of artificially-suppressed cost-of-living adjustments in current budget-deficit negotiations, through the use of the Chained-CPI (see Special C-CPI Supplement at end of this document).
* Use of the CPI to adjust retirement benefits, private income or to set investment goals impairs the ability of retirees, income earners and investors to stay ahead of inflation.
* Understated inflation used in estimating inflation-adjusted growth has created the illusion of recovery in reported GDP.
The understated price inflation also produces the illusion that incomes are rising. When corrected for a more realistic measure of inflation, household incomes have been declining since 2000. In constant purchasing power dollars, household income has been $7,500 +/- $500 since 1967. That's almost 50 years with no real economic growth for the vast majority of the population. See the graph below.
The rich have certainly gotten richer. that's the purpose of the federal reserve and fiat money. It is a
giant pump sucking wealth from the poorest of the poor and
sending it to the uber-rich.
Which explains a lot of the misery, anger, and resentment we all see and experience in this century. The boot on our neck grows heavy.
The current government figures are U.3 at 4.9%, U.6 at 9.7%, and ShadowStats at 22.8%. CPI-U at 1.4%, CPI-W at 1.2%, ShadowStats at 9.0%
Peace,
Silver