[roc]

> "I have no idea whether "rising price inflation" has been underreported, especially by design, by the government."

That shouldn't even be an open question anymore. Concern about the accuracy of government reporting of prices is what gave rise to the Billion Price Project.[1] So unless we posit that MIT is now 'in' on a government conspiracy to suppress price increases, we can put that one to bed.

[1] http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/

[beagle3]

Do you know how the bpp selected their basket of goods? From what I can tell (reverse engineering from the result), they regressed their collected prices against the CPI -- which therefore makes it a not-independent estimator of price.

(If I'm right, this offers evidence neither for nor against accuracy of CPI reporting -- it just makes BPP mostly irrelevant for this discussion until 10 years or so have passed)