CPI Isn’t: Health Insurance Cost Index

The Consumer Price Index is taken as a proxy for how much consumers pay for goods and services. It isn’t, for a wide variety of reasons. Here’s another:

This is a component of overall CPI, but what it tracks is actually retained earnings. The justification is that if retained earnings are down, more of premiums are being spent on healthcare! Of course you don’t care about that, what you care about is how much your insurance costs.

Now there might be some technical argument for this IF all the other components of medical care costs were tracked accurately, but like everything else they are subject to hedonic adjustments and various other hand waving.

As a reminder, hedonic adjustments lead to conclusions like “there was recently a 20 year period during which car prices didn’t rise.”

I will be clearer, the US economy has been shrinking for some time. I’m not sure how long because the numbers are so poisoned it’s impossible to tell. The maximal case is since the early 90s recession (hedonomic adjustments for computers were off the charts, but the evidence finds no overall increase in productivity from computers.) The “almost for sure” case is from the financial crisis, so late 2007.

Almost everyone in the US is worse off, surveys find that two-thirds of Americans can’t afford a decent lifestyle and wealth is shrinking for everyone except the top 1%. This is all concealed by bullshit top line economic statistics.

Properly accounted for I doubt if the American economy is half the size of China’s, and where it matters (manufacturing and resources) it’s probably closer to a third the size. No, “will you have fries with that” and “my job is to write 1,000 page reports” jobs do not count. The second in particular is actively detrimental to the real economy, as is essentially everything done by finance, crypto, and at least half of what American tech companies do.

As I’ve noted before, Trump is accelerating the decline. We’ll go back to Trump’s “unique accelerationist genius” soon.

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