prasen, Isn't that why they have the CPI (consumer price index), which uses multiple commodity prices? I don't know about broccoli, but here are the official USA stats, all the way back to early last century. ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt.prasen9 wrote:I don't understand head or tails of these arguments but the use of the price of iPads or iPhones is somewhat disingenuous and I wish PKB was careful about that while writing about that. The price of electronics usually goes down over the years as better products come into the market. The same camera or computer is expected to be cheaper in three years let alone six or seven. The price of other things do not follow the same trend and maybe he should have chosen a different example. How about Scalia's favorite: broccoli. Has its price gone up or down?
I see that the yearly price increase during the last 20 years is 2.5% and not showing huge variations. Comparing the January prices after each election year, it was 2.60% during the Clinton years, 2.37% during the Bush-II years, and 2.39% during the three Obama years. Before that, the Regan/Bush 12 years saw a 4.2% yearly price increase and the disastrous carter years (77-81) saw a 10.4% increase (the kind of inflation that hadn't been seen since 1921). Anyway, no indication that Obama years are yet causing any huge price inflation, but I suppose Peter believes what some say about some sort of Carter years to be coming soon, and PKB disagrees
.... Jay
