It’s more that Official Inflation is a lie and has been a lie for decades, and always in the direction of understating realiy.
Hence why two money values at different points in time which according to the Official Inflation are equivalent (i.e. one when inflation adjusted using the Official Inflation over the years in between results on the other) have very different purchasing powers, the longer the time distance between them the worst.
It actually makes total sense for politicians to do whatever it takes for Inflation to be understated:
Directly because too much Inflation is seen as a bad thing, so if the official number is lower, it looks better.
Indirectly because Official Inflation affects the Official GDP - GDP calculation first yields a number in today’s money (the Nominal GDP) which then gets “deflated” by Official Inflation (so, the higher the inflation the smaller it gets) to produce the Official GDP figure (i.e. the Real GDP), so if from one year to the next the Official Inflation understates reality, the difference ends up making the GDP look bigger due to the mathematics of its calculation, which appears as GDP “Growth”, something that in the Neoliberal era politicials harp about like crazy (“The Economy grew X% under our government/presidency”)
We are being lied to and have been lied to for a long time about the Economic “success” in our Western countries, which is part of the reason why most people keep feeling poorer all the while politicians keep telling us GDP is growing (the other reasons being the increase in Inequality and, to a lesser extent, some of the actual growth was just population growth and per-capita there was no or negative growth).
It’s more that Official Inflation is a lie and has been a lie for decades, and always in the direction of understating realiy.
Hence why two money values at different points in time which according to the Official Inflation are equivalent (i.e. one when inflation adjusted using the Official Inflation over the years in between results on the other) have very different purchasing powers, the longer the time distance between them the worst.
It actually makes total sense for politicians to do whatever it takes for Inflation to be understated:
We are being lied to and have been lied to for a long time about the Economic “success” in our Western countries, which is part of the reason why most people keep feeling poorer all the while politicians keep telling us GDP is growing (the other reasons being the increase in Inequality and, to a lesser extent, some of the actual growth was just population growth and per-capita there was no or negative growth).