by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
Now they are trying to convince us that dramatically higher prices are good news. Are you kidding me? Our standard of living is being systematically destroyed, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day. The government just announced that in July the consumer price index was 8.5 percent higher than it was the previous July. Of course many have challenged the value of the inflation numbers that the government is giving us because the way inflation is calculated has been changed many times over the years. As John Williams of shadowstats.com has pointed out, if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980 it would be far higher than anything that we experienced during the Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s. You can spin that any way that you want, but it is still a raging national crisis.