No Inflation? Then Explain This
I’m not an economist; I’m just an education administrator. But, like the rest of the middle class these days, I follow some stocks, dabble in mutual funds and feel I can talk the financial talk--the result of being a CNBC aficionado, the new millennium’s soap opera.
What I keep hearing is that stocks are up and the economy’s strong because the government says there’s no inflation. So can someone tell me why gasoline hovers around $2 a gallon, why the price of an average home is hovering in the mid-six-figure range, why taking the family to Disneyland costs a week’s pay and a new car gobbles up the yearly wages of an average worker?
Who generates this economic report? I’m envisioning some half-asleep bureaucrat inhabiting a cubbyhole in the bowels of some impenetrable government building.
But let’s give this bureaucrat the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say that in order to generate his little report, he’s got to make a couple of phone calls and collect a little data. Let’s say he nonchalantly runs his index finger down a column of names in the White Pages and dials the first randomly selected number. “Hi,” he chirps, “what do you do for a living?” and the party on the other end of the line says that she just took her dot-com company public, and now spends her days calculating the value of stock options. “How do you feel about the price of tomatoes?” he asks, and she replies that she never gives it a second thought. His next call lands him on the line with a studio executive whose monthly car lease amount is more than some people pay for rent. Case history No. 3 is the Beverly Hills divorce attorney whose misery-generated income built the walls of his nouveau Tudor mansion and the granite-countered kitchen, which costs more than what he pays his nanny for a year.
I guess the randomness of that bureaucrat’s telephone calls just never put him in touch with the schoolteacher whose dream of owning a fixer-upper is just that, a dream; or with the retired San Diego couple living on a fixed income whose electric bill just soared beyond $200 a month; or with that elderly shut-in who decides to layer up with sweaters rather than tweak the thermostat because she can’t afford heating oil; or with the McDonald’s hamburger flipper living in a San Jose homeless shelter because some dot-comer is shelling out $3,000 a month for a rehabbed, one-bedroom, 700-square-foot Silicon Valley apartment.
Yeah, perhaps that little bureaucrat’s data are a bit skewed. Those of us who dabble in research know what can happen with random samples. And those errors can even be compounded, like when an army of little bureaucrats across the country feed their data to a D.C. government honcho who thunders, “Boys, this is great news, no inflation!”
Do you think a working stiff like me should telephone that honcho and encourage him to pick up the White Pages himself, make some calls and hope he hits an area code from someone on this side of the tracks? Or could it be that he’s not particularly interested in hearing from anyone who might tend to fog up his rose-colored glasses?
