I generally agree with the implied point that goes with this question - people who make vague claims that the CPI is inaccurate don't understand the CPI and don't have specific complaints. However, if you read through the explanatory material in that link (which, let me just say, is a fun way to spend an afternoon although I haven't any time recently) there are some complaints to be had.
It is remarkably challenging to follow what that index is measuring in real terms and whether it is measuring it accurately. It is hard to follow what biases the as-implemented sampling process might be subject to, there are several layers of weighting where it is hard to see how they were come up with and then 25% of the index is Owners' equivalent rent.
So the question is not just can people level specific complaints, but also where are we supposed to draw confidence from that this is a useful number? "Men with suits spent a lot of time coming up with it" isn't a satisfying answer. I don't want to use it for discounting my investments, if my money isn't keeping up with the M2 monetary aggregate I'm shuffling my portfolio around (even gold pretends to have real returns if you discount it using CPI, which is ridiculous). And it isn't especially useful for my personal life because my weightings are not the weightings in this table. And if wages go up based on the CPI... that just reflects workers getting screwed. We've all seen what productivity and profit trends are doing.
It looks like a baffle-them-with-bullshit con to distract from government spending and money printing by pretending that because this particular index doesn't go up everything is fine. The politicians have made the process of figuring out who is paying for the spending complicated enough that it is hard to do. That isn't a strategy that people should accept. Just because the logic is too complicated to understand doesn't mean that they've built a perpetual motion machine. Someone is losing out. This involved index is more of a distraction from the monetary aggregates at this point.
It is remarkably challenging to follow what that index is measuring in real terms and whether it is measuring it accurately. It is hard to follow what biases the as-implemented sampling process might be subject to, there are several layers of weighting where it is hard to see how they were come up with and then 25% of the index is Owners' equivalent rent.
So the question is not just can people level specific complaints, but also where are we supposed to draw confidence from that this is a useful number? "Men with suits spent a lot of time coming up with it" isn't a satisfying answer. I don't want to use it for discounting my investments, if my money isn't keeping up with the M2 monetary aggregate I'm shuffling my portfolio around (even gold pretends to have real returns if you discount it using CPI, which is ridiculous). And it isn't especially useful for my personal life because my weightings are not the weightings in this table. And if wages go up based on the CPI... that just reflects workers getting screwed. We've all seen what productivity and profit trends are doing.
It looks like a baffle-them-with-bullshit con to distract from government spending and money printing by pretending that because this particular index doesn't go up everything is fine. The politicians have made the process of figuring out who is paying for the spending complicated enough that it is hard to do. That isn't a strategy that people should accept. Just because the logic is too complicated to understand doesn't mean that they've built a perpetual motion machine. Someone is losing out. This involved index is more of a distraction from the monetary aggregates at this point.