Wednesday, December 4, 1996
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Whaddya' Know, Inflation Numbers May Be Total Bogus Bullshit

A Blue Ribbon commission of political has-beens, think tank wannabes, and other assorted members of the loser elite, has determined that the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the standard measure of US consumer price inflation, is just a major piece of unadulterated bullshit.

The CPI is determined each month by a bunch of people kidnapped at random off the street and locked in a room together, with a week's supply of, in alphabetical order, alcohol, amphetamines, and guns. Also a dart board.

At the end of the month, whoever's still alive is let out and allowed to return to the jobs and wives they've just lost, and, if there's a dart stuck in the board, the number it hit is fed into a complex formula, and the result of that computation becomes the current CPI. If no dart is stuck in the board, the CPI remains unchanged for the month.

"Despite our best efforts," said Commission chairman and former White House Economic Adviser, Kirk Vomit Jr., "It turns out that the CPI has been totally wrong year after year for, like, 50 years or more, and so, essentially, 80% of everyone living today is, basically, living a lie."

According to Vomit, if the CPI were retroactively corrected, many multi-billionaires would be reduced to poverty, and many impoverished people would become overnight multi-billionaires.

"We are just not ready for the extreme and radical social experiment that would ensue if actual justice were to be implemented," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman, Bill Broth Jr., rushing off for a quick blow job out behind the Senate cloak room.

The consumer price index indicates the index of the price humans have to pay in order to be enslaved by consumer culture, and is determined by taking the number of suicides, adding the number of wife-beatings, multiplying by the number of outright lies and then raising that number to the power of the amount of back-biting and neighbor-screwing per capita.

"This blatant error in the CPI that's been going on for about 50 years now, should in no way lead anyone to believe that all our other economic numbers are also utter bogus bullshit," Senator Broth warned, before rushing off to go consult his Psychic Friends Hotline facilitator.

The Consumer Price Index is based on the increase in the price of Stealth Bombers and Pentagon toilet seats, and is used to determine all aspects of the economy from Social Security cost-of-living increases, to federal income tax brackets.

"If you notice that the price you pay for food and gas and other essentials is, like, constantly getting higher and higher, and yet you're constantly being told that inflation 'just ain't happenin', man,' -- that's the CPI at work," said Senator Broth, before rushing off to cash in his 2-day-old portfolio of just-quadrupled-in-value first day IPOs.

The recommendation by the panel of economists was that more measurements be taken more regularly in as many varied ways as possible and that, in order to accomplish this, hundreds of new panels of economists, consisting of themselves and their best buds, be commissioned to, like, sit around getting stoned and shit-faced in a room together a few days a month for a fee of, like, $500/hr each, or something.

The consumer price index is the dollar value of all goods and services which, when taken together in the aggregate and divided by the number of letters in Thomas Jefferson's name plus the sum of the value of each letter in Abraham Lincoln's name raised to the power of the number of each letter times its position in the name of George Washington -- yields a percentage which is, like, indicative of the, uhh, you know, like the Zeitgeist, or like of somebody's Weltanschauung, or something.




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