Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this?

Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.

Consumer debt is almost as much of a worry as government debt.

Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.

> Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs

Without linking the blogs or articles it’s hard to say much.

Inflation is a topic that attracts a lot of quackery. There are a lot of blogs and websites that go viral from time to time with claims that the “true” inflation number is dramatically higher.

There is a quick reality check you should run whenever you encounter these claims: Take the claimed inflation number over a period of time and calculate the net multiple. Then run a reality check on something like a $500,000 house or a $5 hamburger.

There’s one prolific website and author who claims the “true” inflation rate is some number like 11% going back decades. If you do the math, that means something purchased 50 years ago in 1975 would cost 185 times less. A $1,000,000 home today would have been $5,400 in 1975 and a $5 hamburger today would have been less than $0.03. Obviously these numbers don’t work, so you can discard the author’s claim.

Actual inflation numbers over long periods are very sensitive to small changes due to compounding. Even over a 10 year period. When you see someone claiming dramatically different results, run a quick math check.

Also be careful for the cherry pickers: They’ll identify one or two outlier year-over-year jumps (eggs during COVID, home prices during a housing rush, insurance prices in a city after a fire) and try to use those as their basis.

The defence budget is America's job program. Very little of the money that is defense spending ends up in defense shareholder pockets. The overwhemling vast majority goes to propping up America's (now) anemic industrial base. Remember that virtually all defense dollars are constrained to only be spent on American made things and services. And most of money sent to the big contractors goes to the gazillion sub-contractors they use.

This is why the defense budget is never cut. By anyone red or blue. It's a funnel of money that can be pointed at any location in the US and give a bunch of decent full benefits jobs.

> Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this?

Your question at the end suggests those blogs and articles didn’t include compelling evidence for the case they were making. If true, then it is worth reconsidering whether it makes sense to incorporate into your world view.

> I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher.

Do you mean the other way around? The EU headline inflation rate doesn't include costs of owning a home like the US' does (owner's equivalent rent), which, as you might have guessed if you have ever wanted to own a home, is a component that has been quite inflationary, at least as far as recent memory goes. Or maybe those blogs were talking about some point a long time ago when that component pulled the US figures down (e.g. during the last housing crash)? What specific details did they give?

US vs Europe inflation https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/05/art3full.pdf

"balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc."

Spending does not equal outcomes. There doesn't need to be a spending balance, but there should be an outcomes balance. We can see this with school funding. There are some schools that are underfunded and underperform, but there are also schools with adequate funding that underperform lower funded schools. The implication that you are making is that we could fix things just by cutting back military spending. However, we are also leaders in some of the areas you mention already, such as R&D. The Pentagon fails their audits frequently and should be trimmed down in areas that it makes sense. However, just shifting that money to education isn't going to make that much of an impact.

Had trouble following your core point. Do you have references regarding 900 bases with many bordering China. I have never seen such figures or that they border China.

I can't speak to this, but I suspect something is afoot.

I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.

If the US dollar was being devalued faster than reported, and the Euro wasn't, wouldn't that be visible in the exchange rate?

When you make insane claims like “the US has 900 military bases close to China”, you discredit yourself and your entire body of work.

American consumer debt is also a different beast in the US because households tend to counter inflation and higher prices by shifting over their monthly spending to credit cards. Most Europeans use credit only for certain goods and mostly pay the full amount off every month. This creates an elasticity in the US, where inflation leads to higher prices which slowly leads to higher household debt, which makes recessions more grave when they do appear. Europeans are instead quicker to move to cheaper stores and start buying cheaper goods in bulk.

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win.

Stipulating that they don't get eaten by their bigger neighbors. We're going to miss the Pax Americana.

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win.

Being from Europe, I wish. But for now, it doesn't seem to be the case. Your military power basically allows you to bully Europe and many others, tell us what to buy and whom to buy it from, which is an enormous economic advantage. You just made our puny European leaders promise an enormous investment in the US defense industry in the moment where we would need to propel our own industry the most (it probably won't materialize, but still, we'll spend at least some of it because most of our leaders don't want to be in a bad standing with the US). You are also bullying us into signing contracts with inferior American suppliers rather than Huawei, among many other things. All of this happens mainly due to the US's disproportionate military power. Meanwhile, you can afford having a president who is borderline illiterate (and actually makes binding decisions) without the economy even meaningfully sinking (stocks at historical maximums).

So spending in the military seems to actually be a good choice, unfortunately.

>Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.

Ask Ukraine how that worked out for them. While your at it, tell the Baltics they should focus on society and not the Russian world that is coming for them.

The US and EU have reported broadly similar inflation numbers for the last five years or so, with the EU generally being a little lower. If your thing was true, you'd expect a vast gulf in prices to have opened up, but it doesn't really seem to have.

Anecdotally, I was in SF once or twice a year for a few years before the pandemic, and it felt like mostly similar prices to Dublin (an expensive European city). I've also been back a few times since the pandemic, and it now feels somewhat more expensive than Dublin, but not dramatically. Which is about what you'd expect if the official inflation figures were broadly correct. Obviously this is super-anecdotal, mind you.

Fred has the data:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST#

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0

I’m driving, it’s difficult to put them on the same chart and normalize. But they are very similar. There are differences in methodology (housing, healthcare) but those generally add a small amount to US inflation chained index vs HICP.

What does debt have to do with the calculation of inflation?

It may impact inflation but you seem to be claiming debt is a component of inflation calculation, when inflation is little more than the change in prices.

It's a very difficult belief to have in the long run, because if the source of the "error" is always in one direction, it will compound to price level differences impossible to hide.

It's like the traditional view on GDP growth. Be a little slower than a similar country (say 0.5% a year) wait 20 years, and your formerly similar neighbor now sees your country as quite poor.

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win.

Win what exactly?

Secret defense spending would not and should not impact inflation numbers except in so far as it impacts the already measured consumer basket, the US does not have 900 military bases near China, etc. etc.

Just not a very good comment in my view.

It's like 3% of GDP. Not that big of a deal.

> Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures.

This is a common claim but I don't think it's supported. Defense spending is about 3.3% of GDP [0]. 15 years ago it was 4.9%, 40 years ago it was 6.45%, and it hit almost 10% in 1967 during peak spending in the Vietnam war. World War 2 made it around 35%. Also, what does unreported mean? Are you claiming that there is a significant amount of money being spent that isn't part of the reported military budget? How much? Defense spending was about 13% of the government budget in 2024 [1].

> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.

How much do those cost? I understand the claim is a lot, but how much? If you don't know, why pick this as an example?

> Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.

Defense stocks have not performed better relative to the Dow Jones. Raytheon stock has increased 5-fold since 1985 while the Dow has increased 33-fold over the same period. If defense was easy money, you'd see hedge funds loading up on it year on year. These companies aren't valued that much. Raytheon is valued at 208B [2], which is less than McDonalds, Nestle, T-Mobile, AMD, Home Depot, and Costco individually.

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.

I agree with this, but given that America only spends 13% of the budget on the department of defense, your own claim is claiming an American win. In 2021 the American Rescue Plan induced a giant amount of domestic welfare spending plans such as almost doubling the child tax credit. This was a tremendously expensive plan that cut child poverty in half, but people didn't feel strongly enough to successfully pressure politicians to keep it, which does seem pretty frustrating to me.

Also, I see you're using AI for sources below. Feed your comment into GPT 5 thinking and ask for an opinion, because it apparently thinks your inflation claim is completely reversed.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/

The Pentagon’s informal name for those bases is “the Noose.”

Defense stocks are shit to own, you only make money by buying up politicians and landing large contracts.

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https://www.shadowstats.com/ Tl;Dr. The outlook has changed little. ShadowStats numbers show that the economy remains in a deepening downturn, intensified by ongoing Federal Reserve Rate Hikes. Headline inflation faces a near-term rebound, thanks to the continuing and broadly based excessive growth in the Money Supply and Systemic Liquidity, as triggered by the Fed. Separately, with the Debt Ceiling now eliminated by Congress and the Executive Branch, unfettered Federal Deficit Spending increasingly is adding fuel to the unfolding Inflation. The systemic Inflation is not driven by the Fed’s proclaimed overheating economy. Such an economy simply does not exist, at present.

Likely very specious. Inflation is an emergent property. CPI is measured by looking at consumer prices which is pretty transparent. The underlying causes may be obscured and, in fact, we see a lot of debate on the causes but that is irrelevant to actually measuring CPI.