re: Why so much talk of raising minimum wage? Why no discussion on cost of living?

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That's interesting, because I seemed to still have to spend a similar amount of money to live.

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You don't remember gas was ~1.90 a gallon. I bought a Yukon Denali for $15,000 off MSRP during this time too. Anyway that's all anecdotal.


Here is the official metric, consumer price index (CPI), to measure inflation as reported by he St. Louis Fed over time:



You can see the obvious deflationary "blip" in 2008.

With that said I'm suspect of the CPI metric simply because congress has changed the CPI formula over the years for various reasons. For example there is a bill sitting in congress to tweak the CPI formula to a chained CPI. Republicans like the bill because it reduces increases to SS payments to retirees (because SS increases are based on CPI) and it helps to control baseline budgeting. Democrats hate it for the opposite reasons.

With that said the measure of inflation that I like to use because I believe it really does a better job of reflecting the inflation the consumer actually feels and is not politically skewed is MIT's Billion Prices Index created in 2008. Here's the current index relative to CPI: LINK