No I simply asserted that is is ABSURD to say their prices for 'all consumer products in AGGREGATE' which is what CPI is measuring has averaged 9% for the last 13 years. If I started going into the weeds I could certainly find A product that has tripled, something which has doubled, another which has dropped by half, I could show anything by anecdotes.
It is in our common perception of the value of money and the average of prices that should be used to do a basic sanity check in the same way I would reject a claim that people have been getting 9% taller each year, because the extrapolated change over a time period that I personally experienced is FAR beyond what I would have failed to notice. The official number sounds sane but it could easily be off by a whole percentage point, it is simply not rejected while the Shadow number is rejected.
Think of the implications of a 3 fold increase in aggregate prices, do you think a person who made $5 an hour in 2001 would have exactly the SAME standard of living as someone today making $15 cause that's what ShadowStats is saying. Or take a look at house prices which everyone agrees were in a bubble when they were increasing around 9% a year, according to ShadowStats their was no Bubble, houses were just managing to hold their value during that period and before (during the 90's) they were becoming cheaper in a real sense.
Yes, the tripled price sounds in 13 years sounds believable to me overall. The thing is, memory is a tricky thing and people get accustomed to circumstances and prices really quickly. Can I ask you how old you are? Have you earned your living expenses yourself in 2001 (if you do now)? If not, it's even easier to be deceived.
Take the stuff that gets cheaper each year because of "technical advance" reasons out of the equation - that stuff shouldn't even be in a basket! It's like nowadays inflation baskets consist of 3 flatscreen TVs and an iPhone...
Take rent, public transport, food instead. It's hard to believe, because people forget quickly (just like who lied to them before the last election), but it's very believable... Oh, and I can guarantee you a billion percent that shadowstats is WAY closer to the truth than official numbers. 2% or so!? Who could even remotely believe that?
In regards to housing - there you have it, as you say yourself, unbelievable inflation! That risen price already IS the inflation though, the market is pumped up by a money bubble. Basically, the MONEY is in a bubble, which creates all the other bubbles, with stocks, with goods, with houses... The difference between a house and a banana is just that you won't ever resell the banana anyways, it's eaten and gone (and houses are a special case in that regard as they can be resold without any significant reduction for price for you having used them, as opposed to, say, cars).
The Shadowstats statistics is not just some made up number by John Williams - it's just the governments
own accounting, before they started to fake the numbers a little bit more each year. To claim that those numbers are not true means to claim that the government
on purpose waaaaay overcalculated inflation during the 80ies - by 6% or so more than it actually was! Which is not in the government's best interest at all. It's certainly not how governments act.
Btw, inflation plays into many more economic calculations, which are all subsequently MASSIVELY tainted! Think of the GDP number, for example, or the P/E ratio, which tells us if the stock market is cheap or expensive: All faked by the means of inflation.
The numbers are sad, but they are true.
