World Affairs Brief June 16, 2006 Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief
MASKING THE INFLATIONARY ECONOMY
According to Bloomberg, “U.S. consumer prices excluding food and energy rose more than forecast for a third consecutive month, increasing speculation the Federal Reserve will keep raising interest rates beyond this month. The 0.3 percent jump in the so-called core consumer price index reported by the Labor Department in Washington today exceeded the median forecast of a 0.2 percent increase by economists in a Bloomberg News survey. Core inflation over the last three months was the highest since 1995. Including food and fuel, prices climbed 0.4 percent.”
But as George Ure of Urban Survival comments, “What’s more interesting to me than the numbers themselves, is how the mainstream media has swallowed with virtually no disclosure the fact that the inflation reports in 2006 are not the same thing that we were looking at in 2005 … The Labor Department announced in 2005 that they were ‘changing weights’ of various components: Effective with release of data for January 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will update the consumption expenditure weights in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) and Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) to the 2003-04 period.”
This is not the first time the BLS has tampered with the CPI. It’s a constant process of removing highly inflated prices from the “typical basket of goods” Americans buy in order to manipulate the numbers downward. The BLS creates lots of different categories, as well, in order to mask inflation. They have created what they call a “core inflation rate” which, strangely, does not include food and fuel! How can these two basic necessities not be included in the core inflation category? They do it because they have a political mandate to hide the chronic effects of government monetary creation.
