The trillion dollar robbery: sneaky CPI shift Just when it looked like one out of every ten of the country's poor would have to be euthanized in order to balance the budget, the country's leaders have discovered a less drastic way: take a little from everybody. Using the last refuge of the Washington scoundrel -- a bipartisan commission -- they have come up with the claim that the official cost of living has been greatly missing you love quotes vin number search overstated. By correcting that one alleged error, they can save the government a trillion dollars over the next dozen a years. But where will this trillion dollars come from? It will come out of the pockets of American citizens -- from reduced social security, veterans and disability payments; from cutbacks in federal pensions; from lower income tax deductions and smaller food stamp benefits. And this trillion is just for starters. Many labor contracts and private pension benefits crime social vin number search are based on the CPI. To be sure, rental agreements often use the index as well -- but they provide a rare instance in which the recalculation will help ordinary citizens. In reaching its conclusions, the collection of five economists, led by a conservative think-tanker, produced remarkably precise calculations of enormously arguable phenomena. For example, the commission said that the old CPI didn't take into adequate account improvements in goods and services and that this failure vin number search vin number search overstates inflation by exactly 0.6% a year. For its part, however, the commission did not deal with what Ivan Illich has called the 'disappearing middle.' With modern technology and marketing, the consumer has less and less choice of just how much quality has to be purchased. We are often forced to make the huge cost leap from, say, a bicycle to an automobile or from a $9.95 calculator to a computer. For example, your editor make word search vin number search recently purchased
