Good catch Jem...regarding Piezoe's continued use of Shadow Stats to try and prove a point with regards to college tuitions (vis a vis inflation). It struck me as odd awhile back when he started quoting Shadow Stats and the 8% inflation (just quoting off the top of my head, I haven't read that blog in awhile); MEANWHILE, he continued to heap praise upon Bernanke for endless QE and ZIRP, essentially endorsing the MSM viewpoint that deflation is/was a very serious threat. To call it just outright blatant hypocricy would be an understatement. But it's just par for the course with liberals. In trying to justify the neverending tuition increases, Piezoe is perfectly comfortable quoting the REAL inflation rate. But when talk turns to the Fed and his love affar with Bernanke, Krugman, et al. it's more appropriate to simply quote the massaged and diluted inflation rate...ergo, the need for perpetual ZIRP and quant easing. I figured out awhile ago that Piezoe has an obvious bias with regards to the quasi-governmental appartus known as "higher education". He was obviously employed by some university and has a need to justify the "raping and pillaging" of all these students with stratospheric tuition bills and assorted costs.
I always wonder if Ricter realizes that he sure as hell wouldn't have an "oil and gas" import/export business if his perverted fantasties were to come to fruition... OTOH, the fact that his father-in-law gave him the job is probably the main catalyst for his Marxist fantasies. i.e. he doesn't give a shit about the business.
Then you should "assuage" yourself of such an overwhelming sense of guilt by disgorging all of your profits from the oil and gas import/export business.
Well that is one of the benefits of being leftist/Marxist. Colossal hypocrisy is allowed tolerated and even expected.
Mav, I'm going to respond to only your two comments above. The rest of your post I leave for others to respond to, since these other concerns of yours are only secondarily related to the thrust of my post and this thread. Regarding your first point, which is a good one. There are many individual items taken into account in the BLS CPI calculation and each item is given a weight. College tuition and fees have a weight 1.69/100, significant but not very, in the overall computation. For example Food is 14/100, private transportation 15.69/100, Shelter 31.6/100 etc. I don't know the weightings in the CPI computed by the old method (John Williams) but you could research it if you like. The change was due to the calculation method much more so than the weightings which would be very similar to today's weightings. As the average rate of increase in College tuition is very, very close to the average CPI inflation rate over the last twenty years, you don't have to be an Einstein to know that whether you leave it in the calculation or take it out, you will get virtually the same numerical result. The second point is something that concerns us all,viz., affordability. My posts don't address that point and I prefer to leave that for another discussion. Thank you for vigorously participating in this thread. You raised some very important issues in your previous post that could become the subject of a vigorous debate. As I think I mentioned in another thread, one that got particularly heated, I don't generally respond to ad hominem remarks. If I slipped up a time or two and responded anyway, I shouldn't have. I've noted that the folks I enjoy bantering with in the Politics and Religion Threads are especially adept at both ad hominem interjections and outrageous insults. Lucrum I find exceptionally skilled in that area, and I find him amusing. There are, naturally, a number of others less skilled. It's now time for cocktails. I hope that if you were here you'd be joining me.
I still don't understand what your argument is. On the one hand you are saying you agree college is no longer affordable. On the other hand you are saying that tuition increases are tame and are moving lockstep with inflation. I'm sorry, I never did learn gibberish so you could re-phrase your initial argument so it makes more sense?
Piezoe, I would agree that Shadowstats is much more realistic than gov't stats, no doubt...which is why your claim of tuition in real dollars dropping as all the more incredulous. However, you might consider the matter of which schools Shadowstats referenced for their study - if they did not sample at least 75% of accredited U.S. universities, I call BS. Modest state universities have seen 6-15% increases YoY for at least the past decade. Not only that, just like the food staples you might buy at the local market, price has gone up AND quality has gone down. If the university doesn't fleece quite as much money off of students via tuition, they adjust their business model and increase lab fees, parking fees, shares of book sales, etc. Not to mention HAVING MORE T(eacher) A(ssistant)'s teach classes. It is not so clean-cut of an analysis. "A fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde
I did say, at the beginning of in my original post, to get your attention, that rather than increase, college tuition had actually, in constant dollars, dropped. That's just a guesstimate using the Times articles average 4% per annum increase in total costs (tuition fees room and board) and data from my previous study that I posted here on ET. I don't think any drop is really significant however. As far as I can tell, in constant dollars, using realistic inflation rates for the past twenty years, college tuition has remained about the same. John Williams (shadowstats) did not study college tuition, at least I am not aware of it, if he did. I personally studied tuition increases using data from all 4-year colleges and universities and both BLS and shadowstats.com inflation rates, and I posted the results of that study in considerable detail here on ET. That was quite awhile ago. Even though tuition, in constant dollars, hasn't changed, college may be becoming less affordable for lower middle class families because their income has dropped over the past twenty years when corrected for inflation. It's a little drop using the official inflation rate, but quite a significant drop using real inflation. What is true on average may not be true at all in particular instances. You might find that the tuition at the particular college you had in mind has increased at lot more than inflation would justify. And I don't think you'll find any schools where the tuition has dropped a whole lot. But it was interesting to learn that at two-year schools, cost, on average, when adjusted for the government inflation rate, had actually dropped a little. I suppose that means that when adjusted for real inflation the drop is fairly significant. I think the real lesson here is that what is important to all of us is the price of something in constant dollars relative to our incomes in constant dollars. The media on the other hand does not seem to recognize much beyond nominal dollars, and that can give the naive a very distorted view of reality.. But those wild headlines do sell well.
Something we all need to pay attention to is what rate of inflation is being used when inflation adjusted costs are being reported. There is a very big difference between the realistic inflation rates reported by shadowstats that properly reflect the inflation that we actually experience in our lives and the government's official inflation figures, which are calculated using methods that reduce the COLA adjustments on entitlements. It is apparently too much to ask garden variety journalists to understand these inflation rate nuances, so reader beware.