The real data behind why a dollar buys less every year

The Consumer Price Index tracks the average change over time in prices paid by urban consumers for a representative basket of goods and services: food, housing, transportation, medical care, and more. The methodology is public, the data goes back decades, and it is the same dataset used to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and countless private contracts.

Because CPI changes are typically reported as small monthly and annual percentages, the cumulative effect over a decade or more is easy to underestimate in the moment. Comparing a specific price today against the same price ten or twenty years earlier makes the gap concrete in a way the monthly headline number rarely does.

This establishes that a real, public, government-published dataset documents the ongoing erosion of purchasing power over time, using a transparent and consistent methodology. This is confirmed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own published data and methodology documentation.

What this does not establish is any specific prediction about future inflation, currency values, or investment outcomes. This page describes historical, published data. It is not financial advice, and nothing on this site should be treated as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any specific asset.