by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
I warned you that inflation was going to get worse. On Thursday, we learned that the consumer price index was 7.5 percent higher in January than it was a year ago. We are being told that this was the highest reading since February 1982, and that sounds really bad. But it isn’t exactly honest, because the truth is that the way the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than two dozen times since 1980. So if we are going to compare the rate of inflation today to historical numbers, we should actually be doing an apples to apples comparison.
Fortunately, there is someone out there that takes care of the math for us. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1990, the official rate of inflation would be above 10 percent right now. And if inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be above 15 percent right now.