Never Mind Bogus Measures of Inflation--Purchasing Power Is What Counts, and It's Decaying

If your earnings rose by 34% from January 2020 to October 2023, congratulations, the purchasing power of your labor kept pace with higher costs.

Official measures of inflation are a long-running tragi-comedy: comedic in the transparency of the distortions, and tragic in the consequences: what will you believe is true--the statistics or your lying eyes?

The basic gimmick of distortion is to underweight whatever is eating away at the purchasing power of earnings and highlight the trivial items that…