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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (36040)	7/24/2009 9:46:38 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 71588

Re: "I thought you liked Shadowstat's data." I prefer them to the way the government makes those calculations TODAY. (Shadowstat does not replace the paradigms for how sectors of the economy are visualized by the calculated values --- it simply recalculates the indexes using the conditions that the government PREVIOUSLY UTILIZED, before various and sundry more recent changes were made. Shadowstat runs the numbers using the standards that existed at TWO particular times in history... each right before major alterations were made to the statistical methodology and assumptions --- once in the Reagan years and once in the Clinton years.) They produce a CPI number that is not influenced by the changes that were made during those two periods. And, it is a very useful service that they provide because otherwise there would be NO WAY to compare consumer level inflation with the levels that existed in the 1970s, the 1960s, etc. --- because the procedures the BLS is using now-a-days are DIFFERENT from what they used back then, and so invalidate any comparison. HOWEVER... that does not mean that I don't believe that --- for example --- the BLS calculates the influence that housing has on the consumer price level, or that I don't believe that the entirely screw-up the price level relative to the personal computer industry --- because I do believe that the BLS's methodology is completely incorrect in both instances. (But shadowstat does not run a set of numbers to correct for those, or any other particular methodological weaknesses that exited both in the Reagan / Clinton eras, and still exist now in the BLS's methods. They just run the numbers using the BLS's methods from those TWO SPECIFIC historical periods.