US asset manager Barry Ritholtz, in a blog post dated October 19, 2026, made an observation: since World War Two, the US government's every major methodological adjustment to inflation statistics has moved almost entirely in one direction—lowering the reported inflation number.
He traces this line from 1944 to 2025. During World War Two, the Cost-of-Living Index (COLI) understated price increases by 4 percentage points from 1941 to 1944, as goods became unavailable, wages froze, and black-market pricing took over. In 1945, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) renamed the data series the Consumer Price Index and redefined it as a fixed-basket price index.
Between 1972 and 1975, the stagflation era gave birth to the concept of core inflation. After the 1972–73 food price spike, Fed Chair Arthur Burns had Fed staff strip out food, reasoning it was 'weather, not monetary policy'; after the embargo, energy was removed. Soon after, used cars, mobile homes, and children's toys were stripped one by one until only a fraction of the basket remained. Ritholtz coined the phrase 'Inflation Ex-Inflation' in 2005 to describe this—removing inflation itself from inflation data.
In 1983, BLS changed the housing component of CPI-U from asset price plus mortgage interest cost to owners' equivalent rent (OER). Ritholtz acknowledges this is conceptually defensible—a house is an appreciating asset while shelter is a consumer good—but he points out that the 2002–07 housing bubble did not show up in CPI because rent prices were restrained by millions of Americans stampeding into no-doc, ARM mortgage, home-ownership purchases. The 2021–23 shelter price lag similarly exposed the OER distortion.
The 1995–96 Boskin Commission is where Ritholtz's language is sharpest. He directly called its report 'pure political bullshit.' The Commission estimated CPI overstated inflation by 1.1 points a year (range 0.8–1.6); its political purpose was to reduce cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) and tax bracket creep, saving $1 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade or so. Ritholtz asks: if inflation had been properly reported (e.g., pre-Boskin), might the Federal Reserve have picked up the distortions in the backward, real estate-driven economy?
In 2000, the Fed shifted its preferred inflation gauge from CPI to PCE; in 2004 it moved further to core PCE; since 2012 the 2% target is formally anchored to PCE. Ritholtz notes this lowered the inflation number the Fed is judged against by approximately 0.5 points per year versus CPI. In 2017, the Trump tax cut legislation adopted the chained CPI (C-CPI-U) that Obama had proposed and then withdrawn, for tax bracket indexing.
Ritholtz considers the 2025 episode qualitatively different from all prior adjustments. DOGE firings and other staffing cuts led BLS to suspend CPI collection in several metro areas, replacing it with imputation. Trump fired Commissioner McEntarfer on August 1, 2025, after a bad jobs report, and the Antoni nomination that followed did not go through. Ritholtz writes: this is not creatively re-measuring inflation downwards, but ceasing to measure it entirely.
He acknowledges that changes like OER have theoretical justification, and admits he could be wrong. But his core observation is directional: every major change since 1983 moved in the same direction, and almost always timed to a fiscal or political need.
The strongest counterargument is selection bias: the Boskin Commission's substitution bias, quality adjustment, and new goods bias are standard index-theory problems, not uniquely American; the OER asset/consumer distinction has economics consensus support. Methodological adjustments that could raise inflation readings may never have been proposed or were already rejected, so the 'all downward' pattern may not be a conspiracy but the natural direction of statistical methodology evolution—because most index-theory corrections do tend to lower reported values.