@dwswager - ShadowStats has been debunked more times than Bill O'Reilly's war stories. If you are really serious about analyzing inflation or any other financial parameter from the US Government it's really quite easy. Just visit the FRED Database site that is run by the St. Louis Fed and get your Excel program set up for it. You can slice and dice data in a lot of different ways over varying periods of time.
EDIT: Here is a good critique of ShadowStats and other delusional inflationistas. Interesting that ShadowStats subscription price is higher than Adobe's CC photography package. Wow, that's a real outrage.
All the graph shows is the 2 figures for Inflation: one using the pre-1980 model the government used and one showing the current model. Nothing to debunk. One can argue which model is more representative of an overall macro scale, but in reality neither of them are on a micro scale.
The Washington post article discusses 3 points. First point basically makes the case the government makes for changing the model (substitution of quality and quantity). Basically an Ipad air, because it has new technology and features at the same price as the iPad 1 not only counts as zero inflation, but because of 'quality' substitution it counts as deflation! And the argument leaves out the fact that discretionary goods occupy a larger percentage of the CPI. Good for me and the upper quintiles, but for the lower quintile earners, who spend the bulk of their income on non-discretionary goods it becomes totally unrepresentative.
The 2nd point uses an online scraping model to validate the CPI. Not many people I know buy housing, food, healthcare, transportation, and energy online. I'm Amazon prime for years and buy shit loads from them and B&H and the vast bulk of my spending is still the old fashion way. BTW, I live in a 3600 SQFT all brick house in the city with the highest median income in the entire south! We have the 2nd highest concentration of PhD's in the country (2nd to silicon valley) and the 2nd largest research park next to the triangle in North Carolina. We know all about discretionary spending!
The 3rd point is to assume Shadow stats is bogus because if you use the pre-1980 models for inflation and the current models for Okuns Law it doesn't fit. Nobody is saying that the level of discretionary spending hasn't boomed and the GDP that supports that production. I make a decent chunk of my income in the stock market. I know what sectors are doing well and which aren't. What the data shows is that basic necessities have gotten expensive over time while consumer electronics has not.
This is my last post on this topic as most think I'm trying to bad mouth someone or another. At the end of the day, you can believe that a single number somehow represents the state of the economy, no matter how it's calculation has changed over the years or you can look deeper into the data and figure out how it really impacts you.Oh, and as a student of economics, I believe like W. Edwards Demming did with quality, some numbers are unknown and unknowable so trying to CALCULATE based on some estimated average is chasing your tail. Just punch in different area codes in gas buddy and try 'estimating' a price of gasoline over time and location to use in your calculations while propagating the uncertainty in your model and data. The uncertainty overwhelms the data! I know, I used to do Probablistic Risk Analysis for commercial power reactors!