>I'm not saying anything "avoids" inflation, I'm saying they're exaggerating the problem. I can see why you might think that, but the problem isn't that they'r

>I'm not saying anything "avoids" inflation, I'm saying they're exaggerating the problem. I can see why you might think that, but the problem isn't that they're stating it wrong. If they had $1000 that now buys $700, that is literally 30% less. You're bringing a bunch of tangential factors into this to try to say that the problem isn't that bad, but it is. >A huge portion of your text is acting like it's a binary bad/not-bad, and then acting like I said it's not bad. I'm not saying that. Well, your intention is certainly a binary for/against this idea. You're being extremely pedantic and persistent about saying essentially "It's not as bad as you think". Well, it actually is as bad as I think, and I have been thinking about it almost daily for like 4 years now. >If you talk about what your "money" can buy when complaining about inflation, that's not literally the $500 in your checking account. It's not a complaint that you lost a few hundred dollars, one time, and nothing else changed. "money" in this sense is also talking about the bigger group of income and assets. You're wrong to count other things besides currency as money. Inflation stats are specifically about currency. Roping anything else into it is a red herring. So far you have done two things that are distracting from this: 1. Grouping other assets into "money" that may go up because of inflation itself, or because of other factors like risk or business operations. 2. Wage or benefit increases that may or may not come, and certainly aren't guaranteed. >Yes, "different statistic". That's my fundamental argument. My entire point is that ein0p was conflating "inflation" with measurements of how much they can buy when those are different in a few important ways. There are too many individual circumstances to account for to come up with a statistic like that, and at that point you're measuring properties of individuals and not the monetary system. Even CPI, which measures sampling of prices in many categories, is very complicated. It is also heavily manipulated IMO. >And by "schemes" I'm talking about a couple things that together affect the majority of people, not edge/corner cases. I think you might have good intentions but ultimately you're ignoring a number of circumstances that do affect most people differently, as I have pointed out. The only thing that applies universally to all people is prices, and even then prices in different categories affect different people differently. I think the sampling for CPI is supposed to represent the typical consumer already. What is the goal of these "better" stats which dodge the root of the problem for a majority of people, if not to understate the harm of reckless monetary policy? I'm of the opinion that the statistic that you want is pointless and would also be harmfully misleading if it was created. It might be ok if buried in some report for economists, but it isn't relevant to most people.