What the article does not mention is that of course many people from Southern Europe have migrated north to find work. We now see for example young people from Spain coming to Eastern Central Europe (V4 countries), I think that's happening for the first time in history.
Median usual weekly real earnings for Americans 16 and over were 5% higher in Q1 2018 then they were Q4 of 2007 [1]. From Q1 2014 to Q1 2018, we've seen that statistic grow at about 1% per year (CAGR).
http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/united-states/histor...
In economics, the "real value of a good or other entity has been adjusted for inflation" [1]. The statistic above is thus inflation adjusted. Nominal wages (i.e. those not adjusted for inflation) are up close to 30% between May 2007 and May 2018 [2], or 2.3% per year [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_versus_nominal_value_(eco...
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
[3] (26.9 / 20.84) ^ (1 / 11) - 1
Yes, CPI includes housing, healthcare and education. The only measures commonly stripped out are food and energy, to exclude commodity volatility; that measure is presented as "core inflation" and is more useful when considering things like interest rates than real wages.
Anyways, I’m sure all this falls on deaf ears. If you used the same calculation the Fed used in the 80s to measure inflation we’d currently be at 10%. You can pick and choose and weight whats in the cpi basket to get any number you want and the government is incentivized to make it appear lower.
CPI calculates something called "owners’ equivalent rent of residences" [1]. This is reasonable as nobody purchases a new house every year; instead, one "uses" a portion of the home value over time. When house prices go up, this measure goes up by a similar measure.
Housing was put into CPI in 1954, when it was included as a user-cost item. It was replaced in the early 1980s because user-cost methods include "ex ante expected gain" while usage pricing "includes actual ex post realized capital gains on the house" [1].
> If you used the same calculation the Fed used in the 80s to measure inflation we’d currently be at 10%
Well, yes. You'd be excluding everything invented since 1980, e.g. all modern technology. We don't spend the same fraction of our budget on hams and eggs, as the 1980 definition measured, and most people have health insurance costs now.
If someone insists on living like it's 1980, I suppose observing the old metric would be perfectly valid.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/pdf/homch17.pdf page 104
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1980/06/1980b_b... page 558
That’s only true if you assume interest rates aren’t falling. Artificially low interest rates have inflated the actual price of housing while keeping monthly payments fairly steady.
The Fed is then able to say “look, no inflation!” despite actual prices rising very rapidly.
There's a case to be made for each approach. Given we have excellent ways of measuring house prices, but no great ones for cost of living, having CPI measure the latter and thus usage--instead of user costs--seems reasonable. (We don't include stock appreciations and declines in inflation, for example.)
Those are common sense policies for most people and have nothing to do with racism. Law, order and regimented immigration processes are not racist, though people who want open borders for the express purpose of "making America brown" most definitely are racist. You should check your biases.
Maybe Clinton was just a terrible candidate and Trump was on the right side of many policy issues? No, that couldn't be the case at all. Must be the racism.
You just define your inflation metric to suit normally by ignoring things that have gone up more eg housing and including things that are deflating like say TV's and white goods.
Some governments might, but governments actually need this information for planning, so ones with even modest levels of transparency are unlikely to do much of it, because it would be too easy to detect if it wasn't the only count, and because it would foul their own planning if it was.
> You just define your inflation metric to suit normally by ignoring things that have gone up more eg housing and including things that are deflating like say TV's and white goods.
Yes, one could in theory do that, but what country specifically does that (with citations to specific supporting information)? Many countries report many different inflation indicators some designed to isolate particular contributions that add noise (either because of high seasonality or high-but-irregular volatility), but they tend to also have measures which include those figures, which tend to be the main figure.
Citation needed.
An the inflation that's direct from some one who works in the ONS in the UK