Awhile ago I poked fun at Tim Cavanaugh for speculating that inflation is much higher than official numbers suggest. There's a whole stat-juking cottage industry working to support this conclusion, most prominently the website ShadowStats. As my colleague John Aziz points out, their methodology with respect to inflation is to take the consumer price index and tack on a few points, so unsurprisingly they show inflation as being quite high.
As Matt O'Brien points out today, the most convincing argument against this is that it implies the economy has been in continuous recession since 1988. However, Cullen Roche noticed something that is perhaps even more telling — ShadowStats itself hasn't changed its subscription price in 8 years:
At $175 for a year long subscription, you still get the same ShadowStats. The cost of the subscription has remained the same even as inflation has moved higher. So, in real terms, there's actually been deflation in the cost of a ShadowStats subscription. Pretty ironic for a service that has been touting the coming hyperinflation for about a decade...[Pragmatic Capitalism]
A bargain at any price!
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