Re: Re: Re: Inflation and CPI

2002-07-08 Thread Doug Henwood
joanna bujes wrote: Private school tuition ranges from $8,000/year to $20,000/year...and it goes up every year. My alma mater is up to $34,030! That's nearly 2,300 hours of work at the average wage, twice as much as in 1973, when I was there. But do we know how much people really pay? Most

Re: Re: inflation and cpi

2002-07-07 Thread joanna bujes
Eric concluded: Unfortunately most who cite/use the CPI do not really understand what the CPI intends to measure. This is true for almost _all_ economists who use the CPI-- most are unaware of the limits of the CPI measure and, so, use it in unappropriate ways. The question is, are they fools

Re: Re: Inflation and CPI

2002-07-07 Thread joanna bujes
At 06:09 PM 07/05/2002 -0400, Doug wrote: The CPI market basket is based on the Consumer Expenditure Survey http://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm, not what BLS economists deem it to be, and it includes education, which they weight at 2.7% of spending ftp://146.142.4.23/pub/news.release/cpi.txt. In

Re: Re: Re: inflation and cpi

2002-07-07 Thread enilsson
Joanna wrote re some economists not knowing enough details about CPI, etc: The question is, are they fools or knaves? Some of these are people who want to get ahead and, so, delve only deeply enough into some issue so that they can get published. If the profession doesn't deem something to be

Re: Re: Re: Inflation and CPI

2002-07-07 Thread enilsson
Doug wrote: . . .education, which they weight at 2.7% of spending ftp://146.142.4.23/pub/news.release/cpi.txt. In the CES for 2000, households spent 1.5% of after-tax income on education. These numbers seem low, but that's what they say. That does seem low. But, as oddly, the document

Re: Re: Re: Re: Inflation and CPI

2002-07-07 Thread enilsson
Re the 2.7% average spending on education and childcare: I wonder the extent to which this is due to the use of household spending averages. Example: Beaver and family: $50,000 spending and $10,000 in education and childcare spending = 20 spending on ed/childcare%. 70 year old person (a

RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Inflation and CPI

2002-07-07 Thread Devine, James
Title: RE: [PEN-L:27709] Re: Re: Re: Re: Inflation and CPI also, a lot of the payment for education is in the form of taxes, and so doesn't show up in the CPI. (Does the CPI exclude sales taxes? even if it doesn't, it does exclude most other taxes.) Jd -Original Message- From

Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Inflation and CPI

2002-07-07 Thread enilsson
Jim D. wrote, also, a lot of the payment for education is in the form of taxes, and so doesn't show up in the CPI. (Does the CPI exclude sales taxes? even if it doesn't, it does exclude most other taxes.) Only post-tax spending is included in the CPI. Public school spending, etc, does not