Do you feel stressed out whenever another bill arrives in the mail or another unexpected expense suddenly hits you? If so, you are certainly not alone. All over America, much of the population is living in a constant state of financial stress in 2026. According to a CNBC and SurveyMonkey survey, approximately 63 percent of U.S. adults report living paycheck to paycheck. That figure includes a whopping 81 percent of Americans that make less than $50,000 a year that say that they are living paycheck to paycheck. When you have to constantly watch where every single dollar goes, it can suck the life right out of you. As I discussed in one recent article, 44 percent of Americans now struggle to even afford the most basic necessities. That is nearly half the country. We have been mired in a seemingly endless cost of living crisis for this entire decade, and there is no end in sight. In fact, it appears that it is getting even worse.

On Tuesday, we learned that consumer prices rose even faster than expected last month…

Price increases remained stubbornly high in October as expensive energy prices kept rippling through the US economy, with zero relief in sight for weary American consumers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that consumer prices rose by 0.4 percent in October month over month, after a 0.6 percent gain in September.

The BLS did not release a year-over-year comparison for October 2026 because the agency was unable to gather data one year ago during the 2025 government shutdown – but prices are up about 4 percent over the last 12 months.

Of course the truth is that the cost of living is most definitely not "up about 4 percent over the last 12 months".

It is going up way faster than that.

Since 1978, the way that the federal government calculates the rate of inflation has changed over and over again.

When federal bureaucrats make these changes, the goal is almost always to make the rate of inflation appear to be lower.

On the official BLS website, they actually have a list of all of the revisions that they have made to the way that the Consumer Price Index is calculated. These are just the changes that we have witnessed since 1978…