{"id":31286,"date":"2018-02-20T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31286"},"modified":"2018-02-20T10:00:09","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T15:00:09","slug":"do-you-believe-in-bls-unicorns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31286","title":{"rendered":"Do You Believe in BLS Unicorns"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theburningplatform.com\/2018\/02\/19\/do-you-believe-in-bls-unicorns\/\">DO YOU BELIEVE IN BLS UNICORNS?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>The chart below says there has been 55.6% inflation over the last 20 years. That is just less than a 2.4% annual level of inflation. What a load of bullshit. Let\u2019s look at a couple of categories listed below and do a smell test. Everyone knows the prices of TVs have fallen dramatically, but 99% \u2013 I don\u2019t think so. I was able to find the price of a 28 inch Samsung TV in 1997 \u2013 $750. The same size Samsung TV costs $200 today. That\u2019s a 73% decrease. The good old BLS says the decrease is really 99% because the new TV does so much more. They call this a hedonic adjustment.<\/p>\n<p>It gets better. The BLS shows the cost of housing up about 56% over the last 20 years. Here are a couple indisputable facts from the same government peddling this inflation drivel. The average new home cost $175,000 in 1997. The average new home in 2017 cost $380,000. For the math challenged, that is a 117% increase. The average monthly rent in 1997 was $576. In 2017 it was $1,021. That is a 77% increase. Housing is the biggest weighting in the CPI calculation. Since using actual cost increases would show at least a 90% increase in housing, the BLS drones created a fake calculation called owners equivalent rent which no one can question. That\u2019s how you fake housing inflation.<\/p>\n<p>And now for the funniest bullshit of them all. According to these fake news aficionados, the cost of a new car has not gone up by one dime in the last 20 years. It seems there is some non-government data that says otherwise. The average price of a new car in 1997 was $19,214. The average price of a new car in 2017 was $33,560. Does that strike you as a 0% increase? The actual increase for the average schmuck living in the real world has been 75%. But those good old hedonic adjustments get you back to 0%.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>DO YOU BELIEVE IN BLS UNICORNS? The chart below says there has been 55.6% inflation over the last 20 years. That is just less than a 2.4% annual level of inflation. What a load of bullshit. Let\u2019s look at a couple of categories listed below and do a smell test. Everyone knows the prices of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[926,1055,172,426,827,18734],"class_list":["post-31286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-bls","tag-consumer-price-index","tag-cpi","tag-inflation","tag-united-states","tag-us-bureaus-of-labor-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31287,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31286\/revisions\/31287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}