
U.S. Inflation Remains Low, and That’s a Problem - jonas21
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/us/politics/us-inflation-remains-low-and-thats-a-problem.html?_r=0
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notadoc
It's hard to argue real inflation is low when housing is up 10% to 20% every
year, health care goes up 15% a year, college tuition goes up 10% every year,
etc. I suppose the cost of a flat screen TV is down or flat yoy though.

It's also hard to tell the average person that they not losing more of their
purchasing power every year is a problem.

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existencebox
I'm not sure why this is downvoted. I'm frankly curious along similar lines
myself. I'm going to ramble a few questions I have, skip to my TL;DR for a
more concise followup.

I know for a fact that the CPI calculations have been tweaked on multiple
occasions, but even beyond that distortion, inflation measures to me always
seemed skewed by the fact that they looked globally at such a heterogenous
country. For a given person, however, their own labor and capital may not be
liquid enough to shift if their local ratio of pay vs. COL isn't up to par;
wouldn't that mean a geographic definition of inflation is necessary?

What one should read from the above is that I have a lot of mental dissonance
along the lines of the poster; namely that the basket of goods most people
consider key to a quality of life IS becoming more expensive in most of the
more employment-viable-areas, yet "inflation" as it's stated commonly is flat.
If inflation as a metric doesn't denote the trend the OP and I are focused on,
what is the proper metric, and from that, why isn't THAT being discussed in
TFA?

tl;dr; where is the gap such that common perceptions see inflation in housing
and healthcare to be dominating finances, yet "inflation is flat" has become a
mantra?

