part of  article by james turk about  the purchasing power of gold

The "Real" Gold Price Jan 25 2008 1:43PM

An example will be useful to illustrate this loss of purchasing power.  Let’s assume that a recipient received $850 per month from the US government in January 1980.  Using the US government’s CPI, that recipient is today receiving $2,310. However, if the US government had not made any changes to the way it calculates CPI, the recipient would today be receiving $6,255. This difference can be seen in the following chart, which presents the January $850 gold price adjusted for inflation using both CPI’s.