Comment by eru
2 hours ago
Your graph is rather misleading: you adjust for inflation in two different ways to get 'real' data. One series uses CPI, the other uses the implicit price deflator for gross domestic product.
You can avoid this problem, by plotting nominal values and looking at their ratios. The price level will naturally cancel out.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QI7c is a graph of the ratio of your two deflators (arbitrarily normalised to 1980 Jan 1 equal 100.)
As you can see, it trends up over time. Meaning that CPI grows faster than the GDP price deflator.
This is one reason I graphed them as indexed values. You're not comparing the 'real' inflation adjusted values, but the independent indexed value, relative to a fixed point in time, for both.