The paradox may not need the underground

Reader comment on: The Underground Economy

Submitted by John Gillis (United States), Apr 22, 2013 18:13

The paradox of high personal consumption in an economy with lots of unemployed could be explained away by a proper metric regarding inflation. Unlike the phony CPI pushed by the government, private sources such as Shadowstats.com puts real inflation in the double digit range. Thus the higher personal consumption disappears when adjusted for real inflation, i.e., for the real things people buy such as food and energy. Shadowstats uses the "old" methods from the latter half of the twentieth century, before various Dem and Repub administrations tweaked the methodology of inflation counting, in order to make it less obvious that the currency is being debased at a fairly furious rate.

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