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Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, t

Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks. Consumer debt is almost as much of a worry as government debt. Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.

andsoitis 1y ago
> Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Your question at the end suggests those blogs and articles didn’t include compelling evidence for the case they were making. If true, then it is worth reconsidering whether it makes sense to incorporate into your world view.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  Good point. How do you gather information? I split my time about half each reading US news and news from other countries. There are a few people I find believable like Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and retired congressman Ron Paul (these two guys are quite different politically) and I will listen to each of them once or twice a month, just to occasionally get non-mainstream news viewpoints.
  - jack_h 1y ago
    If you're truly curious I would say the best way to start is to get a basic understanding of economics and how our current system actually operates. It's also important to look up the data as it actually exists rather than consuming conclusions from commentators without investigating further. For instance your initial post seems to imply that we aren't balancing our defense vs social spending and are spending way too much on the former. However, that doesn't align with our current outlays. If you check out the latest US Treasury report the outlays for the current fiscal year shows $1314bn for Social Security, $841bn for interest payments on the debt, $823bn for medicare, $805bn for health, and $758bn for defense. The primary driver of debt in the future will be the entitlement programs and interest. Of course the unfortunate reality is that most people do not have the time to learn about everything and do their own research so we will always rely on others to some extent for our information. The danger is when your world view fills in the gaps of knowledge you lack combined with the facts you believe you know taken from someone else who may be mistaken, misleading, or outright lying.
    - mark_l_watson 1y ago
      Just my opinion (but I did work in the defense industry from 1974 to 1998), but I just don’t believe the published ~ 800 billion defense spending numbers. A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for. Also, I admit to getting much of my information from professor Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist. I took an online economics class from Wharton business school, specifically on the economics of globalization. Fascinating stuff. Anecdotal, but as a hobby for the last 20 years, I enjoy comparing the coverage of major news and economics stories in USA vs. other countries.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - jack_h 1y ago
        > A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for. You're likely referring to the fact that the pentagon can't pass an audit even though there have been requirements going back to the 90s. That's more about tracking where the money they spent is going as opposed to the total quantity of money they are spending though, i.e. the $800bn is "accurate" but some portion of it may have vanished due to bad accounting, corruption, waste, fraud, etc... Having said that any accounting for an entity the size of the US government is non-trivial. The numbers I stated above are not the final numbers. Firstly because it's YTD but also because of the complexity in the accounting. We have decades of trend lines and a lot of public data on tax receipts, bond auctions, and the like to know that defense spending isn't drastically different than what is being reported though. If you have any analysis that concludes otherwise I would enjoy reading it.
- monkeyelite 1y ago
  That’s because consumer inflation is subjective. You can choose which goods and data point represent personal experience. As you well know the government uses “hedonic adjustment” which is when they say a car in 2025 is so much better that a car in 1980 that higher prices should be reduced to reflect that better good. A different model is that you need A car to participate in society so even if it’s better we just raised to the cost to exist.
mlinhares 1y ago
Defense stocks are shit to own, you only make money by buying up politicians and landing large contracts.
- queuebert 1y ago
  In other words, comparatively little of their profits are returned to shareholders. Insiders are making money, but the rest of us are shut out?
  - grim_io 1y ago
    It means that the infamous military industrial complex does not exist in its fabled money printing form. Turns out, the US government is very demanding and stingy with its money for what it ultimately gets.
tootie 1y ago
Likely very specious. Inflation is an emergent property. CPI is measured by looking at consumer prices which is pretty transparent. The underlying causes may be obscured and, in fact, we see a lot of debate on the causes but that is irrelevant to actually measuring CPI.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  Well, look at the history of removing things like living necessities and increasing things that have dropped in price like TVs. Calculation of CPI is deranged by the cherry picking of what they measure.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    What living necessities have been removed that you think should still be there? The dataset inclusions are publicly available: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/entry-level-item-descriptions.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/entry-level-ite...
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    > Well, look at the history of removing things like living necessities and increasing things that have dropped in price like TVs. There are many different measures of inflation. And they serve different purposes. Core inflation, which I suspect is what you’re talking about when talking about removing “living necessities” is a measure used to try and understand long term stable inflation. Since oil and groceries tend to be extremely volatile, core inflation removes those items. No one is saying it’s the one holy measure of inflation. If you’re trying to understand how prices have changed for the consumer over a period of time it’s not a useful measure at all, so you don’t look at core inflation for that purpose. You look at other measures. Also, weights are indeed a complicated issue, but is it really surprising the weight of TVs may have increased over a period of time when owning a TV has gone from being a luxury to a necessity? But anyways, if you don’t like the weights that are used, the underlying segment breakdown is available on the same webpage that contains the summarized calculated inflation figures. Feel free to look at the segment inflation itself.
  - 1y ago
9rx 1y ago
> I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Do you mean the other way around? The EU headline inflation rate doesn't include costs of owning a home like the US' does (owner's equivalent rent), which, as you might have guessed if you have ever wanted to own a home, is a component that has been quite inflationary, at least as far as recent memory goes. Or maybe those blogs were talking about some point a long time ago when that component pulled the US figures down (e.g. during the last housing crash)? What specific details did they give?
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Exactly. Don't know about all of Europe, but I find the way inflation is calculated in the countries i lived here as bad faith since it intentionally omits housing costs. So just like a commenter below said, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. Everyone unanimously agreed the numbers are gamed in order to control public opinion. I've also seen a lot of gaslighting from politicians with mental gymnastics on how the population is not poor but actually rich because "look how many (Asian made)washing machines you can buy with an average salary here today, while for previous generations this type of items was a luxury". Yeah mate, my parent could barely afford a European made washing machine, but they could afford their own house at age 25-30, working jobs that required litte education. Must be all that avocado toast to blame.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
    Yes. I'm from Spain, and here housing rental costs are included in inflation... but they're a 4% of the index. Which is laughable, as most people are spending more like 30%-50% of their income on rent. The rationale is that most people (read: people over 50 or 60) live in houses they own, those spend 0 on rental, so if you calculate the average expenditure on rental, it's low. And buying houses counts as an "investment" so it's not included. So basically what you say: totally gamed.
hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
What does debt have to do with the calculation of inflation? It may impact inflation but you seem to be claiming debt is a component of inflation calculation, when inflation is little more than the change in prices.
- phkahler 1y ago
  >> What does debt have to do with the calculation of inflation? Debt isn't a component of inflation calculation but they are related. During Covid the US government increased the deficit (not debt, the derivative of debt) by a trillion dollars (no partisan stuff here, Trump did it first and then Biden). The infusion of money into the economy was one of the drivers of inflation between 2021 and 2025. You may ask, where did the money come from? I don't know. The government "borrowed" it, but from whom I don't know. Money "invested" does not necessarily get into the economy, but money invested in treasury bond gets spend by the government and definitely ends up in the economy. I would love to have time (get paid?) to sit around and develop useful economic models. All I ever see is people offering simple cause and effect relationships (like I did above) without showing anything close to what I would consider a reasonable model of the economy.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    Technically speaking, the deficit peaked in 2020, fell a hit in 2021, and then fell a lot more in 2022, and then rose a bit in 2023 and 2024. The deficit on 2025 Inauguration Day was way smaller than on 2021 in Inauguration Day, so I’m not sure it would be fair to claim that Biden increased the deficit. See the graph at https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... Downvotes on this are weird, it’s just basic math (the deficit bar in 2025 is way lower than the deficit bar in 2021). I get FoxNews thinking math is a liberal conspiracy, but not HN.
    - RobAtticus 1y ago
      While true, there is another nuance missing here. The deficit was higher in 2020 & 2021 due to the Covid stimulus spending. Looking at 2017-2019 for Trump and 2022-2024 for Biden probably gives a fairer picture of what happened during both presidencies. It's basically been an upward trend since 2015, excluding the Covid outliers.
ttemPumpinRary 1y ago
[dead]
terminalshort 1y ago
It's like 3% of GDP. Not that big of a deal.
Thorrez 1y ago
If the US dollar was being devalued faster than reported, and the Euro wasn't, wouldn't that be visible in the exchange rate?
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  I think Europe has worse financial problems than we do.
  - piva00 1y ago
    Europe != EU != Eurozone.
  - panki27 1y ago
    Who is we?
    - mark_l_watson 1y ago
      I am a US citizen
  - Thorrez 1y ago
    Ok. But we can look at the inflation rate that the US reports, and the inflation rate that the EU reports. Then compare the ratio of those to how the exchange rate changes. I don't see how having financial problems would make this comparison invalid.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    That might be an explanation for as to why the inflation figures are what they are, but the math described above wouldn't change. If one currency is quickly being devalued while another isn't, it is going to be obvious when you try to exchange those currencies.
kingkawn 1y ago
The Pentagon’s informal name for those bases is “the Noose.”
infecto 1y ago
Had trouble following your core point. Do you have references regarding 900 bases with many bordering China. I have never seen such figures or that they border China.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  Google Gemini 2.5 Pro just estimated 200 military bases close to China (I used “close” in my prompt, not very precise, so that number is likely including bases in the general area.) Gemini estimated 750 to 800 total military bases.
  - rafram 1y ago
    This is not useful.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    So no, no sources.
  - vancroft 1y ago
    Al Jazeera reports around 750 US military bases, across the world but concentrated in Europe, Japan and South Korea, and the Middle East. Not quite bordering China. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-military-presence-around-the-world-interactive https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...
    - infecto 1y ago
      This is not wrong but the term base is click baity but probably an accepted definition from the pentagon. It’s include all facilities no matter or large or small and even those that are part of another base but not on the main campus. It’s almost like a count of buildings.
      - abtinf 1y ago
        I haven’t checked, but I would guess this number even includes things like NSA outposts (since NSA is part of DoD) and embassies (which are protected by Marines).
zug_zug 1y ago
I can't speak to this, but I suspect something is afoot. I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.
- 9rx 1y ago
  Inflation seeks to understand the change in value of a currency, not the change in value of a good or service. College being worth more (in the eyes of the customer), rather than the currency being worth less, is what accounts for the 10x increase. I don't know how old your mom is, but it wasn't that long ago that people only went to college if they had good reason to, not because they were told they "had to" under the "A diamond is forever"-style marketing campaign. That shift in mindset enabled colleges to charge basically whatever they want. That is not a product of inflation.
  - gosub100 1y ago
    People didn't need to go to college before the death of the middle class. A couple generations ago you could rent an apartment and have a decent life working at a restaurant or warehouse or factory. Now most entry level jobs pay poverty level wages.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      People didn't need to go to college because nobody cared. Employers were able to look at qualities of the actual person, not some outside attribute bolted onto the side. What changed was Griggs vs. Duke, which outlawed effectively all filtering mechanisms except a college degree, forcing the hand of employers. That still didn't mean the workers had to comply, though. What do you think would happen, with respect to employment, if nobody attained a college degree? Not much. "Welp, no more college graduates. I guess we'd better shut our business down." would be said by nobody. Hiring would carry on as usual (aside from the lines possibly being longer, there being no legal mechanism to cull applicants early). But colleges certainly took the opportunity to present that idea and the people bought it hook, line, and sinker.
Workaccount2 1y ago
The defence budget is America's job program. Very little of the money that is defense spending ends up in defense shareholder pockets. The overwhemling vast majority goes to propping up America's (now) anemic industrial base. Remember that virtually all defense dollars are constrained to only be spent on American made things and services. And most of money sent to the big contractors goes to the gazillion sub-contractors they use. This is why the defense budget is never cut. By anyone red or blue. It's a funnel of money that can be pointed at any location in the US and give a bunch of decent full benefits jobs.
- atomicnumber3 1y ago
  It is also kind of handy that we get aircraft carriers out of it too. Mind you, I'm a socialist, so like, I personally wish we could move a bunch of the "jobs program" stuff over so that instead of carriers, we get well-educated, fed, and cared-for children and good medical care for all, and stuff like that. And that if we want a certain number of aircraft carriers, we should just try to actually get that many carriers on purpose for the cost that building the carriers entails. Without also trying to do 10 million other things on top of it to the point that the carrier output is a side-effect. But like, it's probably better than no carriers at all, which is how it's going for lots of other countries. So I guess that's something to hold on to.
- mbfg 1y ago
  I believe less than a quarter of the defense budget is for salaries and compensations.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    The companies that build and supply things for the military have to pay salaries and compensation, too.
  - Yokolos 1y ago
    https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-defense/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-d... 22%. But operations also includes civilian salaries and procurement naturally includes the labor required to produce what was procured. I would assume that R&D also includes research grants and salaries.
anjel 1y ago
https://www.shadowstats.com/ https://www.shadowstats.com/ Tl;Dr. The outlook has changed little. ShadowStats numbers show that the economy remains in a deepening downturn, intensified by ongoing Federal Reserve Rate Hikes. Headline inflation faces a near-term rebound, thanks to the continuing and broadly based excessive growth in the Money Supply and Systemic Liquidity, as triggered by the Fed. Separately, with the Debt Ceiling now eliminated by Congress and the Executive Branch, unfettered Federal Deficit Spending increasingly is adding fuel to the unfolding Inflation. The systemic Inflation is not driven by the Fed’s proclaimed overheating economy. Such an economy simply does not exist, at present.
- mikeyouse 1y ago
  Shadow stats is a crank blog with absolutely no validity. Choose your debunking source, but the owner of the blog literally just adds an amount to the official rate that he thinks represents the government error. There’s no calculation, there’s no “pre-1980 methodology”, just one dude’s vibes. If the rate has averaged 9% over the past 25 years, you’d be talking about over 750% inflation since 2000. You can buy any manner of new car today for $35k - could you buy a new car for $5k in 2000? Did a gallon of gas cost $0.40/gallon? Could you rent a modern $1,500 apartment for $200/month? https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-rate-isnt-14-percent https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-r...
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    If he actually did the work of calculating using the earlier methodology, it could actually be interesting, but it probably wouldn't say what he thinks. But yeah, that site is BS.
hibikir 1y ago
It's a very difficult belief to have in the long run, because if the source of the "error" is always in one direction, it will compound to price level differences impossible to hide. It's like the traditional view on GDP growth. Be a little slower than a similar country (say 0.5% a year) wait 20 years, and your formerly similar neighbor now sees your country as quite poor.
- danans 1y ago
  And yet many less-rich countries have better infrastructure and health outcomes than the US. It seems clear that chasing GDP without also considering what is happening to wealth distribution has socially hollowed the otherwise-rich US.
klooney 1y ago
> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. Stipulating that they don't get eaten by their bigger neighbors. We're going to miss the Pax Americana.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  We will miss the US Navy keeping most shipping routes open and safe.
Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. Win what exactly?
sleepyguy 1y ago
>Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc. Ask Ukraine how that worked out for them. While your at it, tell the Baltics they should focus on society and not the Russian world that is coming for them.
christianqchung 1y ago
> Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. This is a common claim but I don't think it's supported. Defense spending is about 3.3% of GDP [0]. 15 years ago it was 4.9%, 40 years ago it was 6.45%, and it hit almost 10% in 1967 during peak spending in the Vietnam war. World War 2 made it around 35%. Also, what does unreported mean? Are you claiming that there is a significant amount of money being spent that isn't part of the reported military budget? How much? Defense spending was about 13% of the government budget in 2024 [1]. > If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. How much do those cost? I understand the claim is a lot, but how much? If you don't know, why pick this as an example? > Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks. Defense stocks have not performed better relative to the Dow Jones. Raytheon stock has increased 5-fold since 1985 while the Dow has increased 33-fold over the same period. If defense was easy money, you'd see hedge funds loading up on it year on year. These companies aren't valued that much. Raytheon is valued at 208B [2], which is less than McDonalds, Nestle, T-Mobile, AMD, Home Depot, and Costco individually. > Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc. I agree with this, but given that America only spends 13% of the budget on the department of defense, your own claim is claiming an American win. In 2021 the American Rescue Plan induced a giant amount of domestic welfare spending plans such as almost doubling the child tax credit. This was a tremendously expensive plan that cut child poverty in half, but people didn't feel strongly enough to successfully pressure politicians to keep it, which does seem pretty frustrating to me. Also, I see you're using AI for sources below. Feed your comment into GPT 5 thinking and ask for an opinion, because it apparently thinks your inflation claim is completely reversed. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget#:~:text=of%20interactive%20chart.-,%25%20of%20GDP,-Chart https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni... [1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder... [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/
abtinf 1y ago
When you make insane claims like “the US has 900 military bases close to China”, you discredit yourself and your entire body of work.
- 4fterd4rk 1y ago
  They didn't say that. Your reading comprehension is poor.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - abtinf 1y ago
    > If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. I would grant them the benefit of the doubt if English wasn’t their native language, but they’d identified as a US citizen elsewhere in the thread and their name strongly implies native speakership. In the US, this conversational construction in this context is most reasonably interpreted as the second sentence completing the thought in the first. If a manager asks an employee “how many dents are on the bumber?” A response of “I think the total number is close to 900”, that would be in reference to just the dents on the bumper, not all over the car. Also, elsewhere in the thread, they’ve acknowledged they simply made the number up (by just repeating what a GPT said).
    - mark_l_watson 1y ago
      No, I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro in ‘deep research’ mode to give me an estimate.
    - layer8 1y ago
      The sentence starts with “If you look at a map of our military bases”, which refers to all US military bases, not just the ones bordering China. The second sentence refers to that totality of bases. I’d grant that there is a bit of ambiguity, but insinuating an “insane claim” is jumping the gun on a misreading that should have been fairly obvious in light of the “insanity”.
giantg2 1y ago
US vs Europe inflation https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/05/art3full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/05/art3full.pdf "balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc." Spending does not equal outcomes. There doesn't need to be a spending balance, but there should be an outcomes balance. We can see this with school funding. There are some schools that are underfunded and underperform, but there are also schools with adequate funding that underperform lower funded schools. The implication that you are making is that we could fix things just by cutting back military spending. However, we are also leaders in some of the areas you mention already, such as R&D. The Pentagon fails their audits frequently and should be trimmed down in areas that it makes sense. However, just shifting that money to education isn't going to make that much of an impact.
Aurornis 1y ago
> Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs Without linking the blogs or articles it’s hard to say much. Inflation is a topic that attracts a lot of quackery. There are a lot of blogs and websites that go viral from time to time with claims that the “true” inflation number is dramatically higher. There is a quick reality check you should run whenever you encounter these claims: Take the claimed inflation number over a period of time and calculate the net multiple. Then run a reality check on something like a $500,000 house or a $5 hamburger. There’s one prolific website and author who claims the “true” inflation rate is some number like 11% going back decades. If you do the math, that means something purchased 50 years ago in 1975 would cost 185 times less. A $1,000,000 home today would have been $5,400 in 1975 and a $5 hamburger today would have been less than $0.03. Obviously these numbers don’t work, so you can discard the author’s claim. Actual inflation numbers over long periods are very sensitive to small changes due to compounding. Even over a 10 year period. When you see someone claiming dramatically different results, run a quick math check. Also be careful for the cherry pickers: They’ll identify one or two outlier year-over-year jumps (eggs during COVID, home prices during a housing rush, insurance prices in a city after a fire) and try to use those as their basis.
- username332211 1y ago
  At the risk of defending quackery, most claims about inflation being inaccurate involve the changes made to CPI estimations in 1996. I'll go as far as to say I've never heard any claim that is inaccurate going back to the 1970s.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    Still, if the "real" inflation rate was ~10% starting in 1996 then a $5 burger today supposedly cost ~$0.30 in 1996. A lot of soda vending machines will sell a 20oz bottle of soda for ~$2.50. Were soda vending machines selling bottles of soda for $0.15 back then? No.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      Guys and Dolls has 15 cent hot dogs advertised in one of the shots. Gas station hot dogs are about $1.50 now. Which is less than I’d have expected it to be, to be honest.
whimsicalism 1y ago
Secret defense spending would not and should not impact inflation numbers except in so far as it impacts the already measured consumer basket, the US does not have 900 military bases near China, etc. etc. Just not a very good comment in my view.
GreedClarifies 1y ago
Fred has the data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0 I’m driving, it’s difficult to put them on the same chart and normalize. But they are very similar. There are differences in methodology (housing, healthcare) but those generally add a small amount to US inflation chained index vs HICP.
- layer8 1y ago
  You read and post on HN while driving?
- CalRobert 1y ago
  Please don’t use your phone while driving.
- mulmen 1y ago
  Put your phone it down before you kill someone. You’re taking an indefensible risk.
timcambrant 1y ago
American consumer debt is also a different beast in the US because households tend to counter inflation and higher prices by shifting over their monthly spending to credit cards. Most Europeans use credit only for certain goods and mostly pay the full amount off every month. This creates an elasticity in the US, where inflation leads to higher prices which slowly leads to higher household debt, which makes recessions more grave when they do appear. Europeans are instead quicker to move to cheaper stores and start buying cheaper goods in bulk.
Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. Being from Europe, I wish. But for now, it doesn't seem to be the case. Your military power basically allows you to bully Europe and many others, tell us what to buy and whom to buy it from, which is an enormous economic advantage. You just made our puny European leaders promise an enormous investment in the US defense industry in the moment where we would need to propel our own industry the most (it probably won't materialize, but still, we'll spend at least some of it because most of our leaders don't want to be in a bad standing with the US). You are also bullying us into signing contracts with inferior American suppliers rather than Huawei, among many other things. All of this happens mainly due to the US's disproportionate military power. Meanwhile, you can afford having a president who is borderline illiterate (and actually makes binding decisions) without the economy even meaningfully sinking (stocks at historical maximums). So spending in the military seems to actually be a good choice, unfortunately.
rsynnott 1y ago
The US and EU have reported broadly similar inflation numbers for the last five years or so, with the EU generally being a little lower. If your thing was true, you'd expect a vast gulf in prices to have opened up, but it doesn't really seem to have. Anecdotally, I was in SF once or twice a year for a few years before the pandemic, and it felt like mostly similar prices to Dublin (an expensive European city). I've also been back a few times since the pandemic, and it now feels somewhat more expensive than Dublin, but not dramatically. Which is about what you'd expect if the official inflation figures were broadly correct. Obviously this is super-anecdotal, mind you.

andsoitis 1y ago

> Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Your question at the end suggests those blogs and articles didn’t include compelling evidence for the case they were making. If true, then it is worth reconsidering whether it makes sense to incorporate into your world view.

mark_l_watson 1y ago
Good point. How do you gather information? I split my time about half each reading US news and news from other countries. There are a few people I find believable like Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and retired congressman Ron Paul (these two guys are quite different politically) and I will listen to each of them once or twice a month, just to occasionally get non-mainstream news viewpoints.
- jack_h 1y ago
  If you're truly curious I would say the best way to start is to get a basic understanding of economics and how our current system actually operates. It's also important to look up the data as it actually exists rather than consuming conclusions from commentators without investigating further. For instance your initial post seems to imply that we aren't balancing our defense vs social spending and are spending way too much on the former. However, that doesn't align with our current outlays. If you check out the latest US Treasury report the outlays for the current fiscal year shows $1314bn for Social Security, $841bn for interest payments on the debt, $823bn for medicare, $805bn for health, and $758bn for defense. The primary driver of debt in the future will be the entitlement programs and interest. Of course the unfortunate reality is that most people do not have the time to learn about everything and do their own research so we will always rely on others to some extent for our information. The danger is when your world view fills in the gaps of knowledge you lack combined with the facts you believe you know taken from someone else who may be mistaken, misleading, or outright lying.
  - mark_l_watson 1y ago
    Just my opinion (but I did work in the defense industry from 1974 to 1998), but I just don’t believe the published ~ 800 billion defense spending numbers. A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for. Also, I admit to getting much of my information from professor Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist. I took an online economics class from Wharton business school, specifically on the economics of globalization. Fascinating stuff. Anecdotal, but as a hobby for the last 20 years, I enjoy comparing the coverage of major news and economics stories in USA vs. other countries.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - jack_h 1y ago
      > A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for. You're likely referring to the fact that the pentagon can't pass an audit even though there have been requirements going back to the 90s. That's more about tracking where the money they spent is going as opposed to the total quantity of money they are spending though, i.e. the $800bn is "accurate" but some portion of it may have vanished due to bad accounting, corruption, waste, fraud, etc... Having said that any accounting for an entity the size of the US government is non-trivial. The numbers I stated above are not the final numbers. Firstly because it's YTD but also because of the complexity in the accounting. We have decades of trend lines and a lot of public data on tax receipts, bond auctions, and the like to know that defense spending isn't drastically different than what is being reported though. If you have any analysis that concludes otherwise I would enjoy reading it.
monkeyelite 1y ago
That’s because consumer inflation is subjective. You can choose which goods and data point represent personal experience. As you well know the government uses “hedonic adjustment” which is when they say a car in 2025 is so much better that a car in 1980 that higher prices should be reduced to reflect that better good. A different model is that you need A car to participate in society so even if it’s better we just raised to the cost to exist.

mlinhares 1y ago

Defense stocks are shit to own, you only make money by buying up politicians and landing large contracts.

queuebert 1y ago
In other words, comparatively little of their profits are returned to shareholders. Insiders are making money, but the rest of us are shut out?
- grim_io 1y ago
  It means that the infamous military industrial complex does not exist in its fabled money printing form. Turns out, the US government is very demanding and stingy with its money for what it ultimately gets.

tootie 1y ago

Likely very specious. Inflation is an emergent property. CPI is measured by looking at consumer prices which is pretty transparent. The underlying causes may be obscured and, in fact, we see a lot of debate on the causes but that is irrelevant to actually measuring CPI.

mark_l_watson 1y ago
Well, look at the history of removing things like living necessities and increasing things that have dropped in price like TVs. Calculation of CPI is deranged by the cherry picking of what they measure.
- XorNot 1y ago
  What living necessities have been removed that you think should still be there? The dataset inclusions are publicly available: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/entry-level-item-descriptions.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/entry-level-ite...
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  > Well, look at the history of removing things like living necessities and increasing things that have dropped in price like TVs. There are many different measures of inflation. And they serve different purposes. Core inflation, which I suspect is what you’re talking about when talking about removing “living necessities” is a measure used to try and understand long term stable inflation. Since oil and groceries tend to be extremely volatile, core inflation removes those items. No one is saying it’s the one holy measure of inflation. If you’re trying to understand how prices have changed for the consumer over a period of time it’s not a useful measure at all, so you don’t look at core inflation for that purpose. You look at other measures. Also, weights are indeed a complicated issue, but is it really surprising the weight of TVs may have increased over a period of time when owning a TV has gone from being a luxury to a necessity? But anyways, if you don’t like the weights that are used, the underlying segment breakdown is available on the same webpage that contains the summarized calculated inflation figures. Feel free to look at the segment inflation itself.
- 1y ago

9rx 1y ago

> I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Do you mean the other way around? The EU headline inflation rate doesn't include costs of owning a home like the US' does (owner's equivalent rent), which, as you might have guessed if you have ever wanted to own a home, is a component that has been quite inflationary, at least as far as recent memory goes. Or maybe those blogs were talking about some point a long time ago when that component pulled the US figures down (e.g. during the last housing crash)? What specific details did they give?

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
Exactly. Don't know about all of Europe, but I find the way inflation is calculated in the countries i lived here as bad faith since it intentionally omits housing costs. So just like a commenter below said, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. Everyone unanimously agreed the numbers are gamed in order to control public opinion. I've also seen a lot of gaslighting from politicians with mental gymnastics on how the population is not poor but actually rich because "look how many (Asian made)washing machines you can buy with an average salary here today, while for previous generations this type of items was a luxury". Yeah mate, my parent could barely afford a European made washing machine, but they could afford their own house at age 25-30, working jobs that required litte education. Must be all that avocado toast to blame.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
  Yes. I'm from Spain, and here housing rental costs are included in inflation... but they're a 4% of the index. Which is laughable, as most people are spending more like 30%-50% of their income on rent. The rationale is that most people (read: people over 50 or 60) live in houses they own, those spend 0 on rental, so if you calculate the average expenditure on rental, it's low. And buying houses counts as an "investment" so it's not included. So basically what you say: totally gamed.

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago

What does debt have to do with the calculation of inflation? It may impact inflation but you seem to be claiming debt is a component of inflation calculation, when inflation is little more than the change in prices.

phkahler 1y ago
>> What does debt have to do with the calculation of inflation? Debt isn't a component of inflation calculation but they are related. During Covid the US government increased the deficit (not debt, the derivative of debt) by a trillion dollars (no partisan stuff here, Trump did it first and then Biden). The infusion of money into the economy was one of the drivers of inflation between 2021 and 2025. You may ask, where did the money come from? I don't know. The government "borrowed" it, but from whom I don't know. Money "invested" does not necessarily get into the economy, but money invested in treasury bond gets spend by the government and definitely ends up in the economy. I would love to have time (get paid?) to sit around and develop useful economic models. All I ever see is people offering simple cause and effect relationships (like I did above) without showing anything close to what I would consider a reasonable model of the economy.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Technically speaking, the deficit peaked in 2020, fell a hit in 2021, and then fell a lot more in 2022, and then rose a bit in 2023 and 2024. The deficit on 2025 Inauguration Day was way smaller than on 2021 in Inauguration Day, so I’m not sure it would be fair to claim that Biden increased the deficit. See the graph at https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... Downvotes on this are weird, it’s just basic math (the deficit bar in 2025 is way lower than the deficit bar in 2021). I get FoxNews thinking math is a liberal conspiracy, but not HN.
  - RobAtticus 1y ago
    While true, there is another nuance missing here. The deficit was higher in 2020 & 2021 due to the Covid stimulus spending. Looking at 2017-2019 for Trump and 2022-2024 for Biden probably gives a fairer picture of what happened during both presidencies. It's basically been an upward trend since 2015, excluding the Covid outliers.

ttemPumpinRary 1y ago

[dead]

terminalshort 1y ago

It's like 3% of GDP. Not that big of a deal.

Thorrez 1y ago

If the US dollar was being devalued faster than reported, and the Euro wasn't, wouldn't that be visible in the exchange rate?

mark_l_watson 1y ago
I think Europe has worse financial problems than we do.
- piva00 1y ago
  Europe != EU != Eurozone.
- panki27 1y ago
  Who is we?
  - mark_l_watson 1y ago
    I am a US citizen
- Thorrez 1y ago
  Ok. But we can look at the inflation rate that the US reports, and the inflation rate that the EU reports. Then compare the ratio of those to how the exchange rate changes. I don't see how having financial problems would make this comparison invalid.
- 9rx 1y ago
  That might be an explanation for as to why the inflation figures are what they are, but the math described above wouldn't change. If one currency is quickly being devalued while another isn't, it is going to be obvious when you try to exchange those currencies.

kingkawn 1y ago

The Pentagon’s informal name for those bases is “the Noose.”

infecto 1y ago

Had trouble following your core point. Do you have references regarding 900 bases with many bordering China. I have never seen such figures or that they border China.

mark_l_watson 1y ago
Google Gemini 2.5 Pro just estimated 200 military bases close to China (I used “close” in my prompt, not very precise, so that number is likely including bases in the general area.) Gemini estimated 750 to 800 total military bases.
- rafram 1y ago
  This is not useful.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  So no, no sources.
- vancroft 1y ago
  Al Jazeera reports around 750 US military bases, across the world but concentrated in Europe, Japan and South Korea, and the Middle East. Not quite bordering China. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-military-presence-around-the-world-interactive https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...
  - infecto 1y ago
    This is not wrong but the term base is click baity but probably an accepted definition from the pentagon. It’s include all facilities no matter or large or small and even those that are part of another base but not on the main campus. It’s almost like a count of buildings.
    - abtinf 1y ago
      I haven’t checked, but I would guess this number even includes things like NSA outposts (since NSA is part of DoD) and embassies (which are protected by Marines).

zug_zug 1y ago

I can't speak to this, but I suspect something is afoot. I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.

9rx 1y ago
Inflation seeks to understand the change in value of a currency, not the change in value of a good or service. College being worth more (in the eyes of the customer), rather than the currency being worth less, is what accounts for the 10x increase. I don't know how old your mom is, but it wasn't that long ago that people only went to college if they had good reason to, not because they were told they "had to" under the "A diamond is forever"-style marketing campaign. That shift in mindset enabled colleges to charge basically whatever they want. That is not a product of inflation.
- gosub100 1y ago
  People didn't need to go to college before the death of the middle class. A couple generations ago you could rent an apartment and have a decent life working at a restaurant or warehouse or factory. Now most entry level jobs pay poverty level wages.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    People didn't need to go to college because nobody cared. Employers were able to look at qualities of the actual person, not some outside attribute bolted onto the side. What changed was Griggs vs. Duke, which outlawed effectively all filtering mechanisms except a college degree, forcing the hand of employers. That still didn't mean the workers had to comply, though. What do you think would happen, with respect to employment, if nobody attained a college degree? Not much. "Welp, no more college graduates. I guess we'd better shut our business down." would be said by nobody. Hiring would carry on as usual (aside from the lines possibly being longer, there being no legal mechanism to cull applicants early). But colleges certainly took the opportunity to present that idea and the people bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Workaccount2 1y ago

The defence budget is America's job program. Very little of the money that is defense spending ends up in defense shareholder pockets. The overwhemling vast majority goes to propping up America's (now) anemic industrial base. Remember that virtually all defense dollars are constrained to only be spent on American made things and services. And most of money sent to the big contractors goes to the gazillion sub-contractors they use. This is why the defense budget is never cut. By anyone red or blue. It's a funnel of money that can be pointed at any location in the US and give a bunch of decent full benefits jobs.

atomicnumber3 1y ago
It is also kind of handy that we get aircraft carriers out of it too. Mind you, I'm a socialist, so like, I personally wish we could move a bunch of the "jobs program" stuff over so that instead of carriers, we get well-educated, fed, and cared-for children and good medical care for all, and stuff like that. And that if we want a certain number of aircraft carriers, we should just try to actually get that many carriers on purpose for the cost that building the carriers entails. Without also trying to do 10 million other things on top of it to the point that the carrier output is a side-effect. But like, it's probably better than no carriers at all, which is how it's going for lots of other countries. So I guess that's something to hold on to.
mbfg 1y ago
I believe less than a quarter of the defense budget is for salaries and compensations.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  The companies that build and supply things for the military have to pay salaries and compensation, too.
- Yokolos 1y ago
  https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-defense/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-d... 22%. But operations also includes civilian salaries and procurement naturally includes the labor required to produce what was procured. I would assume that R&D also includes research grants and salaries.

anjel 1y ago

https://www.shadowstats.com/ https://www.shadowstats.com/ Tl;Dr. The outlook has changed little. ShadowStats numbers show that the economy remains in a deepening downturn, intensified by ongoing Federal Reserve Rate Hikes. Headline inflation faces a near-term rebound, thanks to the continuing and broadly based excessive growth in the Money Supply and Systemic Liquidity, as triggered by the Fed. Separately, with the Debt Ceiling now eliminated by Congress and the Executive Branch, unfettered Federal Deficit Spending increasingly is adding fuel to the unfolding Inflation. The systemic Inflation is not driven by the Fed’s proclaimed overheating economy. Such an economy simply does not exist, at present.

mikeyouse 1y ago
Shadow stats is a crank blog with absolutely no validity. Choose your debunking source, but the owner of the blog literally just adds an amount to the official rate that he thinks represents the government error. There’s no calculation, there’s no “pre-1980 methodology”, just one dude’s vibes. If the rate has averaged 9% over the past 25 years, you’d be talking about over 750% inflation since 2000. You can buy any manner of new car today for $35k - could you buy a new car for $5k in 2000? Did a gallon of gas cost $0.40/gallon? Could you rent a modern $1,500 apartment for $200/month? https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-rate-isnt-14-percent https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-r...
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  If he actually did the work of calculating using the earlier methodology, it could actually be interesting, but it probably wouldn't say what he thinks. But yeah, that site is BS.

hibikir 1y ago

It's a very difficult belief to have in the long run, because if the source of the "error" is always in one direction, it will compound to price level differences impossible to hide. It's like the traditional view on GDP growth. Be a little slower than a similar country (say 0.5% a year) wait 20 years, and your formerly similar neighbor now sees your country as quite poor.

danans 1y ago
And yet many less-rich countries have better infrastructure and health outcomes than the US. It seems clear that chasing GDP without also considering what is happening to wealth distribution has socially hollowed the otherwise-rich US.

klooney 1y ago

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. Stipulating that they don't get eaten by their bigger neighbors. We're going to miss the Pax Americana.

mark_l_watson 1y ago
We will miss the US Navy keeping most shipping routes open and safe.

Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. Win what exactly?

sleepyguy 1y ago

>Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc. Ask Ukraine how that worked out for them. While your at it, tell the Baltics they should focus on society and not the Russian world that is coming for them.

christianqchung 1y ago

> Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. This is a common claim but I don't think it's supported. Defense spending is about 3.3% of GDP [0]. 15 years ago it was 4.9%, 40 years ago it was 6.45%, and it hit almost 10% in 1967 during peak spending in the Vietnam war. World War 2 made it around 35%. Also, what does unreported mean? Are you claiming that there is a significant amount of money being spent that isn't part of the reported military budget? How much? Defense spending was about 13% of the government budget in 2024 [1]. > If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. How much do those cost? I understand the claim is a lot, but how much? If you don't know, why pick this as an example? > Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks. Defense stocks have not performed better relative to the Dow Jones. Raytheon stock has increased 5-fold since 1985 while the Dow has increased 33-fold over the same period. If defense was easy money, you'd see hedge funds loading up on it year on year. These companies aren't valued that much. Raytheon is valued at 208B [2], which is less than McDonalds, Nestle, T-Mobile, AMD, Home Depot, and Costco individually. > Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc. I agree with this, but given that America only spends 13% of the budget on the department of defense, your own claim is claiming an American win. In 2021 the American Rescue Plan induced a giant amount of domestic welfare spending plans such as almost doubling the child tax credit. This was a tremendously expensive plan that cut child poverty in half, but people didn't feel strongly enough to successfully pressure politicians to keep it, which does seem pretty frustrating to me. Also, I see you're using AI for sources below. Feed your comment into GPT 5 thinking and ask for an opinion, because it apparently thinks your inflation claim is completely reversed. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget#:~:text=of%20interactive%20chart.-,%25%20of%20GDP,-Chart https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni... [1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder... [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/

abtinf 1y ago

When you make insane claims like “the US has 900 military bases close to China”, you discredit yourself and your entire body of work.

4fterd4rk 1y ago
They didn't say that. Your reading comprehension is poor.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- abtinf 1y ago
  > If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. I would grant them the benefit of the doubt if English wasn’t their native language, but they’d identified as a US citizen elsewhere in the thread and their name strongly implies native speakership. In the US, this conversational construction in this context is most reasonably interpreted as the second sentence completing the thought in the first. If a manager asks an employee “how many dents are on the bumber?” A response of “I think the total number is close to 900”, that would be in reference to just the dents on the bumper, not all over the car. Also, elsewhere in the thread, they’ve acknowledged they simply made the number up (by just repeating what a GPT said).
  - mark_l_watson 1y ago
    No, I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro in ‘deep research’ mode to give me an estimate.
  - layer8 1y ago
    The sentence starts with “If you look at a map of our military bases”, which refers to all US military bases, not just the ones bordering China. The second sentence refers to that totality of bases. I’d grant that there is a bit of ambiguity, but insinuating an “insane claim” is jumping the gun on a misreading that should have been fairly obvious in light of the “insanity”.

giantg2 1y ago

US vs Europe inflation https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/05/art3full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/05/art3full.pdf "balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc." Spending does not equal outcomes. There doesn't need to be a spending balance, but there should be an outcomes balance. We can see this with school funding. There are some schools that are underfunded and underperform, but there are also schools with adequate funding that underperform lower funded schools. The implication that you are making is that we could fix things just by cutting back military spending. However, we are also leaders in some of the areas you mention already, such as R&D. The Pentagon fails their audits frequently and should be trimmed down in areas that it makes sense. However, just shifting that money to education isn't going to make that much of an impact.

Aurornis 1y ago

> Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs Without linking the blogs or articles it’s hard to say much. Inflation is a topic that attracts a lot of quackery. There are a lot of blogs and websites that go viral from time to time with claims that the “true” inflation number is dramatically higher. There is a quick reality check you should run whenever you encounter these claims: Take the claimed inflation number over a period of time and calculate the net multiple. Then run a reality check on something like a $500,000 house or a $5 hamburger. There’s one prolific website and author who claims the “true” inflation rate is some number like 11% going back decades. If you do the math, that means something purchased 50 years ago in 1975 would cost 185 times less. A $1,000,000 home today would have been $5,400 in 1975 and a $5 hamburger today would have been less than $0.03. Obviously these numbers don’t work, so you can discard the author’s claim. Actual inflation numbers over long periods are very sensitive to small changes due to compounding. Even over a 10 year period. When you see someone claiming dramatically different results, run a quick math check. Also be careful for the cherry pickers: They’ll identify one or two outlier year-over-year jumps (eggs during COVID, home prices during a housing rush, insurance prices in a city after a fire) and try to use those as their basis.

username332211 1y ago
At the risk of defending quackery, most claims about inflation being inaccurate involve the changes made to CPI estimations in 1996. I'll go as far as to say I've never heard any claim that is inaccurate going back to the 1970s.
- vel0city 1y ago
  Still, if the "real" inflation rate was ~10% starting in 1996 then a $5 burger today supposedly cost ~$0.30 in 1996. A lot of soda vending machines will sell a 20oz bottle of soda for ~$2.50. Were soda vending machines selling bottles of soda for $0.15 back then? No.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Guys and Dolls has 15 cent hot dogs advertised in one of the shots. Gas station hot dogs are about $1.50 now. Which is less than I’d have expected it to be, to be honest.

whimsicalism 1y ago

Secret defense spending would not and should not impact inflation numbers except in so far as it impacts the already measured consumer basket, the US does not have 900 military bases near China, etc. etc. Just not a very good comment in my view.

GreedClarifies 1y ago

Fred has the data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0 I’m driving, it’s difficult to put them on the same chart and normalize. But they are very similar. There are differences in methodology (housing, healthcare) but those generally add a small amount to US inflation chained index vs HICP.

layer8 1y ago
You read and post on HN while driving?
CalRobert 1y ago
Please don’t use your phone while driving.
mulmen 1y ago
Put your phone it down before you kill someone. You’re taking an indefensible risk.

timcambrant 1y ago

American consumer debt is also a different beast in the US because households tend to counter inflation and higher prices by shifting over their monthly spending to credit cards. Most Europeans use credit only for certain goods and mostly pay the full amount off every month. This creates an elasticity in the US, where inflation leads to higher prices which slowly leads to higher household debt, which makes recessions more grave when they do appear. Europeans are instead quicker to move to cheaper stores and start buying cheaper goods in bulk.

Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. Being from Europe, I wish. But for now, it doesn't seem to be the case. Your military power basically allows you to bully Europe and many others, tell us what to buy and whom to buy it from, which is an enormous economic advantage. You just made our puny European leaders promise an enormous investment in the US defense industry in the moment where we would need to propel our own industry the most (it probably won't materialize, but still, we'll spend at least some of it because most of our leaders don't want to be in a bad standing with the US). You are also bullying us into signing contracts with inferior American suppliers rather than Huawei, among many other things. All of this happens mainly due to the US's disproportionate military power. Meanwhile, you can afford having a president who is borderline illiterate (and actually makes binding decisions) without the economy even meaningfully sinking (stocks at historical maximums). So spending in the military seems to actually be a good choice, unfortunately.

rsynnott 1y ago

The US and EU have reported broadly similar inflation numbers for the last five years or so, with the EU generally being a little lower. If your thing was true, you'd expect a vast gulf in prices to have opened up, but it doesn't really seem to have. Anecdotally, I was in SF once or twice a year for a few years before the pandemic, and it felt like mostly similar prices to Dublin (an expensive European city). I've also been back a few times since the pandemic, and it now feels somewhat more expensive than Dublin, but not dramatically. Which is about what you'd expect if the official inflation figures were broadly correct. Obviously this is super-anecdotal, mind you.