KaiserJeep wrote: "Real" inflation is actually around 8% to 11% per year in US$. This compounds rapidly when you do the math.
No citations, I see.
Well, IF inflation were in the ballpark of 9 or 10 percent, then that would compound rapidly. But it's not even close to that in the US, overall.
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What are you measuring? College education and medical care costs? Well, those have significant inflation.
Overall prices? Accept for the conspiracy theorists like Shadowstats and peoples' intuition (people who tend to ignore that some prices fall and MANY prices don't rise rapidly), not so much.
Eyeballing a Shadowstats chart, they claim US inflation since 1982 has averaged about 9% a year. (Right in your stated range).
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_da ... ion-chartsSo by the rule of 72, prices would double every 8 years. So that would be 4.5 doublings in prices in the US since 1982.
But the thing is, 4.5 doublings would mean prices were up over 20-fold since 1982. That's so far off for anything but College and Medical care, it's laughable.
I look around at the real world and for things like rents, clothes, food, housing, cars, gasoline, crude oil,natural gas, electronics, etc. 2 doublings, resulting in prices 4 times as high, is still quite a bit too high. And that's consistent with US inflation calculators on the net, which says prices are up about 161%.
Emotion isn't a good thing to make longer term economic measurements with. It's one of the way the financial Cassandras get their terrible track record.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.