Vancouver Sun (opinion) - Small CPI inaccuracies add up to hundreds of millions of dollars

The feds spend way more than they should and they take in way less revenue - many hundreds of millions of dollars in total - as a result of what sounds like a small flaw in the way they measure inflation.

It would be easy to fix, says Christopher Ragan, who holds the David Dodge Chair in Monetary Policy at the C.D. Howe Institute and teaches economics at McGill University. But fixing this problem would likely peeve a lot of voters. So -and this is my analysis, not his -I don't expect to see it addressed before the next federal election, and then only if some party wins a majority.

The thrust of Ragan's analysis in a new paper published Tuesday is that Canada's Consumer Price Index, or CPI, tends to overestimate inflation by an average of 0.6 percentage points a year. So if the CPI says prices have risen two per cent, it's really just 1.4.