by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-20 22:02:45+00:00
Very bright observations.

You must be looking at some serious equations and related data.

If you were alive back then you would have watched as inflation appeared "out of nowhere" and before long it was obvious that dollars were going to buy less & less each year for the foreseeable future. Government benefits needed to be tied to inflation under emergency conditions or everyone was going to be voted out by millions that were now underwater otherwise.

So they needed something to gauge inflation by and tie benefit dollar increases to, and ended up inventing the CPI.

The CPI was not expected to be very good, just quick. To say expectations were "highly manipulated" would be an understatement. If people didn't settle for something quite deficient in realism to begin with, who knows how many legislative sessions it might take? People could lose everything in that much time.

The exact purpose of CPI was carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of inflation as much as possible and get away with it. It was plain to see as it went along, like any other slow-motion dumpster fire that lawmakers go through when almost none of their intents are entirely honorable.

And CPI just became more laughable ever since.

But that wasn't enough.

Then one day the GDP comes along, with "reasonable" excuses about how multinational American companies are not like they used to be, so good old GNP can no longer act as the best measure going forward.

GDP was even more carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of non-prosperity and inflation, allowing it to run its course under the radar if it could just be brought low enough (but not low enough to be tolerable all the way back when things were really prosperous). Without knowing if that could even be achieved, it was plain to see when overprovisioning was taking place to try and compensate. There's nothing like a long, deep massage of the figures, and "feelings" can improve remarkably if the most obvious pain points are addressed. Temporarily of course.

You will notice that it is never obvious when the overnight transition from GNP to GDP took place. You had to be there. All the old data has been "refactored" creatively as designed in an attempt to make "comparison more valid". Who would benefit or not if people were still able to compare apples to apples, and who makes the rules anyway? By this time after all these years without recovery, "sentiment" was thought to be the only salvation possible, but even the most positive outlook couldn't help consumers who had lost their purchasing power. But a consumer economy was going to be the only road to "recovery", they had to keep spending just to survive regardless of how anemic it was by then.

Anyway the stock market crashes, continuous devaluation of the dollar for years, millions of layoffs, and consumers (millions of who could not afford US-made cars or other products any more) who were increasingly offered foreign alternatives they would readily purchase as much as they can -- all ran their course and it was not enough to end the most ridiculous part of the madness.

There had to be an oil crash and a real estate crash too, before things could finally level out under that old radar beam.