>was not constantly being adjusted CPI is rarely adjusted, and all reasons are quite well explained at the BLS site [1]. As people buy less horses and more car

>was not constantly being adjusted CPI is rarely adjusted, and all reasons are quite well explained at the BLS site [1]. As people buy less horses and more cars it makes sense to adjust the basket of goods to match what people currently buy, not what they used to buy. They also provide the methodology on how data is gathered, processed, what changes were made, why, and the effect on future numbers using both old and new methods. They select new methods because it tracks what CPI is supposed to track better than old methods. Shadowstats is often a nonsense site. The article you link provides no methodology, and as I pointed out above, if the inflation they claim existed we'd see it in massive price changes. Those changes are not there. Do yourself a favor: take the shadowstats claimed inflation, start in 1985, and compute how prices should have increased. Then look at prices of those goods from 1985 till now. You'll see it's nonsense. The Billion Prices project is an independent group trying to compute inflation as accurately as possible. Here [2] is one place showing how well BPP and CPI match up. And as above - if shadowstats, or any group had a way to compute inflation that was much different than CPI, there would be huge wealth flowing to them from simply trading derivatives based on the mismatch between the official inflation and their more accurate number. I've seen no one doing that, and I've looked. Care to show me who is making all this money based on having more accurate inflation numbers? [1] http://www.bls.gov/cpi/ http://www.bls.gov/cpi/ [2] http://www.mymoneyblog.com/inflation-cpi-vs-bpp.html http://www.mymoneyblog.com/inflation-cpi-vs-bpp.html