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This is a long one, so for all the details (including charts, graphs, and links) click thru for the original article. No paywall.

https://brownstone.org/articles/since-lockdowns-a-12-gdp-loss-half-of-us-dollar-purchasing-power-stolen/

Many of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020 – including industrial stoppages, monetary printing, supply-chain disruptions, extended school closures, and general population demoralization – was in fact far greater than official statistics indicate.

What follows will shore up this intuition, using new techniques and numbers from an innovative project called RealityIndex.co.

It’s true that official data is bad enough, showing a 26% loss in purchasing power, slow growth in output, and only marginal improvements in real income. The labor participation rate and worker/population ratio never fully recovered and continue to fall.

Output has been lackluster. It’s supposedly running 2.3% which is about half the postwar norm for US economic performance. It feels like a general downshift. Official data shows a brief recession in 2020 followed by gradual economic recovery overall.

But is this even true? In 2024, Brownstone Institute commissioned a study (by E.J. Antoni and Peter St. Onge) that concluded that we have never really entered recovery after 2022. We’ve been in a technical recession since that time. They got this with some limited adjustments of price data bumped up against output data. That study was met with brutal attacks, with every critic falling back on official data and doubting the supposed extremism of the conclusion.

That’s where matters have stood even as reports pour in concerning broken labor markets, no raises for 1 in 4 professional-class workers, and sketchy Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data that seems barely above zero thanks mainly to medical-sector subsidies, government spending, and social services. Then there are the learning losses showing dramatic declines in test scores among affected students.

We are left with real questions. How can consumer sentiment be at historic lows given that the overall data seems to raise no loud alarms?

In the meantime, Artificial Intelligence has come along to make these complicated calculations possible, ones that seek to discern and delineate the huge gaps between official data and reality. The goal is to come up with real data concerning real prices, sans the many different methods that the Department of Labor uses to adjust price changes.

For example, housing prices are not measured directly but rather converted to owners’ equivalent rent (OER). Medical service prices are adjusted for consumption, not premiums or final bills. When consumers substitute one good for another, that is also factored in. When the quality of a good or service improves, the statisticians apply what they called hedonic adjustments, which are invariably designed to minimize price increases and never run the other direction.

Where does this leave those of us who are looking for a plain index of prices? A veil has been put over that basic question and answer, such that we don’t know for sure. This matters tremendously for issues like raises, examining cost of living increases, taxes, and pension payments. Everything is adjusted for inflation to convert it to real valuations but if we don’t have a clear number, what are we to do?

This is why we should be thrilled about a new study/service called the Reality Index. You are free to browse the site yourself and examine every aspect of the method. Essentially, the site owner, an independent intellectual in Madrid, Tom Elliott, has deployed tools of AI to wholly reconstruct price indices in a way that is consistent with actual prices. His results are absolutely eye-popping. I’ve examined the method here in detail and found no fault.

The Wall Street Journal has also taken notice. This is good news and raises the possibility that we can finally get to the truth.

The core of the problem is a constantly changing methodology in official data. The formula was changed eight times over 35 years. All the changes seem technical and vaguely justifiable, once explained. Adding them all up, you get wild distortions in the data that the index is supposed to reveal. All these changes came home to roost in the great inflation of 2021-2024, which might be entering a second wave right now.

(long snip) . . . The big picture is that the lockdowns, not only nationally but globally, were far more catastrophic for us economically than has been generally admitted or recognized. It is not unusual in the history of economics for the really bad news to emerge years and even decades after an exogenous shock such as war.

We would rather not wait that long. The crisis is too real and the public knows, even if the official data does not admit the truth.

Lockdowns were a kind of war on the population. The economic carnage might have sliced off half of the purchasing power of the dollar and cut output by as much as 12% over six years (in real terms, leaving aside missed counterfactual growth on the previous trajectory), even as labor participation never recovered and continues to fall.

Did Covid kick off a kind of permanent recession? How many decades must pass before we admit what happened? More precisely, how much longer will it take before the public mind recognizes what they did to us?

If nothing changes, nothing changes. It is a harsh but true reality. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got. The RINO's GOT TO GO. $ 9 Billion just went to Ukraine.