New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:
One point missed in the debunkings so far is that the source Tom Coburn is almost certainly using, shadowstats.com, is total nonsense. The basic thrust of Coburn’s and Ron Paul’s inflation conspiracy theory is that the government has changed the way it measures inflation over time to intentionally generate a deceptively low inflation figure. By using older inflation-measuring methods (e.g. the method used in 1980 for some reason), we can cancel out all that deception and get the true inflation. But, as John Aziz pointed out recently, this Shadow Stats site people like Coburn rely upon for this “real” inflation figure is clearly not measuring anything. Instead, Shadow Stats just takes the official government inflation figure and adds on some fixed constant to arrive at its own figure. That’s it.