What? I was being nice with my response earlier. But if you want to poke the bear...
You said...
...this, then followed with...
...this. Which is completely incorrect. For example: In 2012, $0.69 bought a hardshell Taco at Taco Bell. Now that same menu item is $1.59. In 2012, a quart of motor oil was $3.99, now that same brand is $7.49. In 2012 a can of Progresso Clam Chowder soup was $.89, now it's $1.79. Picking up on a theme yet? You suggested that general prices have gone up only 20%. That is utter hogwash. Prices have jumped up 35% in that last 6 months ALONE, to say nothing of the previous decade..
You understand that singular examples do not constitute an overall picture, right? That such a thing as outliers exists?
If you fail to understand the context of my point, that failure is on you, not me.
If you fail to understand the content of the post you're trying to contradict, that is on you, not me.
Now lets focus on that same idea applied in context to the defined topic of this thread. GPUs price are staggeringly more expensive. In 2012 $600 bought you a top of the line GPU model(or very close to it) from either AMD or NVidia. That same $600 will barely get you a bottom tier model NOW. The top tier model? $2500 MSRP. Good luck getting it at that price though.
SO saying that spending $250 now was like spending $200 then is not only historically flawed, but is lacking any common sense whatsoever.
Again: relevance? This is an outlier, and not in and of itself relevant to either inflation nor CPI.
EDIT;
It has been suggested that you being in the EU(Sweden), things might be different and that we might be looking at the same world from very different perspectives. It is known that things in the EU are different from things in North America.
I was talking about US dollars and the US CPI specifically.
Those numbers are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for wage earner income, not for consumer goods costs. Wages have in no way kept up with the increase of cost in consumer goods.
To quote the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services.
It has nothing to do with wage earner income, but is a measure of prices for a (nominally representative selection of) consumer goods. You can critique the selection (which often has severe flaws), you can critique how such statistics minimize the effects of statistical outliers, but you can't refute that for what they measure, they're overall correct, and they're typically a decent-enough guideline for overall impressions, even if they will necessarily be wrong in a lot of cases. That's what happens when you try to present an averaged measure for something supposedly applying to 300+ million people.
Even in that graph, you'll notice the very sharp upturn since 2020.
Have I or anyone else here claimed otherwise? Last I checked, if you're looking at changes 2012-2022, anything happening in 2020 is included in that.
I'm going based on business costs and expenditures for my shop and my home.
Yet you responded to a post specifically mentioning
inflation and cost of living increases
You are literally not talking about the same thing as me. At all.
Food and cosumables costs have increased 35% over the last year alone for much of what we buy. Many supplies purchased for my shop have jumped as much as 45%. The previous treads are effectively null due to the effect of the pandemic.
Your anecdotal data does not disprove the statistical validity of actual large-scale measurements of the cost of living. You might be in an outlier group (or several - geographic, socioeconomic, hobbies and activities, etc.); you might be selectively noticing outliers that have increased more than the average, etc. I have no way of (or interest in) knowing this, but again: your experience does not contradict the validity of the statistics. Nor was I talking about you. The two are not in conflict - an average measurement is an average, and there are always outliers in all directions. Being an outlier sucks, but that doesn't make the average wrong.
So: the next time you make a knee-jerk "nuh-huh!" reaction to a post, maybe make sure that you're actually talking about the same thing the person you're responding to is talking about? Without that, dialogue is literally impossible.
One correction I could make: I could have combined CPI
and inflation, which would have taken that ~$250 number to something more akin to ~$310 in the same period (2012-2022) (based on the US City average CPI data for January 2012 vs. 2022 (a 24,2% increase). While this would push my numbers upwards by a bit, it wouldn't materially change what I said.
The CPI also clearly shows the dramatic increases in costs over the past year - the CPI increased as much from January 2021 to January 2022 as it did from September 2016 to January 2021. But again: that's included in the 2012-2022 change.
