> I wonder if a big part of the allleged theft from the little guy isn't due to dishonest CPI statistics that manipulate officially reported inflation to be lower than the cost of living increases most people experience.
The thing is, the breakdowns, source materials, algorithms, data - they're all published. This isn't Joe Biden goes to the podium and bestows unto us that the CPI was 7% annualized this quarter and doesn't take follow-up questions. Everything is tracked, measured and published by the BLS. [1] People don't take it at face value, think tanks run their own assessments too. Then you have crackpots that just "add 7.5%" to the number and call it a day. [2]
But intuitively we know that "just add 7.5%" is way too high, because if the annualized inflation had been 10% since the year 2000, that means prices would have to be a minimum of 8X higher than they were in 2000.
- In the year 2000 an iMac cost $799. The latest iMac is $1299, not $7000. That would be 2.2% inflation.
- In the year 2002 a Big Mac cost $2.39. Today a Big Mac is $3.99, not $19.12. That would also be 2.6% inflation.
This whole conspiracy theory around a wildly different "shadow" CPI is just that.
You can even compute your own based on receipts you have lying around. I suspect you'll find it not materially different from the published numbers.
> Also perhaps fractional reserve banking does create the issue thatp those who can borrow money and buy assers have an advantage over those at the bottom who strugglle to buy assets and cannot borrow.
I'm not rejecting the cantillon effect wholesale, I'm asking for a quantification, which I have yet to see anyone provide. Folks tend to point at it and blame it for everything but then not have any substantiation of its size.
However, I strongly suspect poor folks and especially middle class folks, have far more debt as a percentage of net worth than rich folks do and so spend more time at the spigot so to speak - relatively, not in absolute terms.
> The challenge with honest money, is you cannot really control monetary policy (the free market will set interest rates) , but the benefit is, nobody can debase it too easily.
Debase is a poor term to use because modern economics shows us that supply and value are not tied in the way folks intuit. For instance, Japan has 3X'd their money supply since 1990 but their CPI is literally dead-ass 0% and has been for 30 years. Their prices for anything and everything on average remain exactly the same as in 1990. This is why we reject the Austrian school.
> ... but also if you gonna bailout consumers with stimmies they will pay for it later in higher taxes.
Money has a value and a duration. Stimulus bills pull future money into the present. You don't pay for it later in taxes, per se. If the stimulus creates economic activity yielding revenues in excess of the stimulus itself then it can be 'free.'
A stimulus is an investment and it is a common mistake to look at the liabilities line without looking at the assets line.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/
[2] http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts