[mosdef]

[ QUOTE ]
Last time I checked, everyone I know uses food and energy. And for the majority of people, and most especially the poor, food and energy are a significant fraction of their daily budget. It is arguably the most important portion of the budget, since without food and energy, you pretty much die of starvation or exposure in short order.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a good point, and supports your argument.

[ QUOTE ]
Meanwhile the inflation rate on food and energy is much higher than the inflation rate amongst other consumer goods (especially for food now that this ethanol madness is ramping up; they are forcing us to BURN OUT FOOD IN OUT CARS). It is patently ridiculous to exclude food and energy from the calculation; the ONLY conceivable reason you would do so is to hide the true cost of inflation.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not quite. If swings in the prices of a few components of an index are large enough to dwarf the changes in the rest of the index, then including them can make it look (for exampe) like prices are going up when everything except energy is actually going down. Note that there have been times when core inflation exceeded CPI, so you can't say that the purpose is to reduce inflation estimates just because that's what the methodology does in the current circumstances.

Anyway, I agree with you that leaving things out is pretty artifical and ultimately does more harm than good. My bigger problem was that you threw out criticism of the method on the basis that it was a government method and must therefore be bad. This is an ever-growing trend on the forum due to the thunderous AC applause for all anti-government posts with no demand for supporting arguments.