re: #505 Gus 802

Isn’t that amazing. Didn’t that start around the Nixon administration?

Lies, Damned Lies and Inflation Statistics

In the early 1970s, the United States found itself vexed by a newly powerful cartel of foreign oil producers, a 300 percent rise in crude prices and a new and unpleasant realization that Americans were no longer the sole masters of their own economic house. Rather than reining in its own politically driven monetary policies to slow the surge in consumer prices accompanying the oil shock, the Nixon-era Federal Reserve hit on the novel strategy of trying to cover it up instead. The traditional “headline” inflation rate, measuring the rise or fall of an average of all prices for a broad basket of goods and services, was nudged aside in favor of an index that stripped out the supposedly more volatile categories of food (subject to price spikes due to weather or plague) and energy (subject to price spikes due to unfriendly foreigners). Consumers may still have felt pain at the gas station and grocery store, but the government would no longer officially confirm their discomfort.

Sorry about the distinctly unreliable source, but it’s the first I found.