>Basket of things with a vastly oversized share of cheap plastic crap made
The "basket of things" is made from the ratios of things consumers buy. BLS explains the methodology and lists the basket, and how it evolves as people buy less horse carriages and more cars, less giant radios and more iPhones, and so on.
Making a basket that better represents inflation would be worth a lot of money, and a lot of groups try, but none really do any better than the BLS.
For example, the Billion Prices Project out of MIT tracks a vastly larger number of things, but ends up with the same inflation rates http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/
The "basket of things" is made from the ratios of things consumers buy. BLS explains the methodology and lists the basket, and how it evolves as people buy less horse carriages and more cars, less giant radios and more iPhones, and so on.
Making a basket that better represents inflation would be worth a lot of money, and a lot of groups try, but none really do any better than the BLS.
For example, the Billion Prices Project out of MIT tracks a vastly larger number of things, but ends up with the same inflation rates http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/