Media Elite Belittle Inflation Struggles of Ordinary Americans

A top writer for the Wall Street Journal thinks Americans who complain about the economy just aren't aware of how good things are.

Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip wrote a gaslighting article last week with the headline, "What's Wrong With the Economy? It's You, Not the Data."

The article begins with the claim that Americans just don't have the facts on inflation.

He cites the "century-old consumer-price index," apparently unaware the index has been repeatedly and heavily modified by bureaucrats since the last embarrassing inflation crisis in the late ‘70s.

The facts are, he claims, that inflation has fallen from 6% to 3.2% over the past year, but according to polls people still think inflation is higher.

One problem with the analysis is that the author doesn't account for something basic. When you ask Americans if inflation is higher in a poll about how the economy is going, the question many (most?) of them hear is: Are prices up?

The answer to that question is, of course, yes. Prices are higher, even if the rate of further increases has slowed. Pretty much everything is way more expensive, and wages aren't keeping up.

The problem isn't that Americans are stupid or misinformed. Inflation is destroying their buying power.

Relying upon rigged government statistics is another big problem in the financial press generally. Ip and the rest of the corporate press should spend more time at ShadowStats.com to see what has happened to prices when measured the same way it was done in 1980.

Prices are rising roughly twice as fast as the Bureau of Labor Statistics would like Americans to believe.

The Bureau's employment data surprisingly didn't come up in Ip's Journal story. "Stellar" reports on the unemployment rate and job creation are a lynchpin in most of the analysis about how strong the economy is.

The journalists faithfully reporting these statistics seem unaware as to how these reports are being dismantled in the alternative media.

The latest report, which landed Friday, was another massive "beat" according to the headline data. The much more sobering truth is the jobs created were all part-time. And a hugely disproportionate number of the people finding employment were illegal aliens.

In reality, businesses have been reluctant to offer full-time positions.

Strapped Americans are losing out to illegal immigrants who will work for less.

The employment picture is reliably worse than reported. The pattern has been for the BLS to dramatically revise initial "blowout" job creation numbers lower in the following months.

Yet the unquestioning mainstream press just keeps belittling Americans for misunderstanding how great the economy is.

Rigged government statistics and the journalists who parrot them are part of a grander malaise developing in the country. Both play a role in the destruction of trust. Awakening Americans find themselves having to navigate a world where neither the government nor the press can be relied upon for the truth.

The loss of confidence will have profound implications when it comes to investments. It should, for example, affect which assets are considered as "safe-havens." A rising number of people aren't going to turn to the fiat dollar or Treasury debt when they decide to run for the exits.

While the list of "safe" assets was never long to begin with, it is shrinking. Chief among them are gold and silver, which carry no credit risk and offer tangible, historically tested inflation protection.

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