It’s even worse than that, because it’s a metric-less measurement. They are literally putting out a data point that essentially says “the size of 20 inches has been changed by 2 inches.”

It’s meaningless, because the very notion of attempting to measure it has no foundation. The money IS the measuring tool. Trying to use a “basket of goods” means that every single change in the market, liquidity, quality, production process, innovation in organization, energy cost, and thousands of other factors that go into those things work *against* it having any meaning at all. 

In short, the CPI is just flat bullshit. It works in the govt favor in almost every way. The only data point that matters is how much money did the govt or banking system counterfeit into existence. Which can’t even be easily calculated. That is the number of what was stolen from us or misallocated in the economy. Everything else is nonsense.

(Analogy: the CPI is like trying to measure how far you threw a football without being able to compare it to the ground, instead you compare it to a bunch of people in the area, the leaves on the ground, the football players, cars on the road nearby, the water flowing in the creek next to the field, the clouds over head - and making the argument that if you have enough of these things, we can figure out where the ball went. Then the wind blows a little or it rains, and all of the measurements mean Jack shit in trying to make sense of what happened to the ball.)