Proof Engine Verification: The purchasing power of the US dollar has declined by more than 90% since the Federal Reserve was established in 1913.

Automated fact-verification of the claim: "The purchasing power of the US dollar has declined by more than 90% since the Federal Reserve was established in 1913." Verdict: PROVED Key Findings The US dollar has lost 96.85% of its purchasing power since 1913, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). This exceeds the 90% threshold by 6.85 percentage points. $1.00 in 1913 has the purchasing power of approximately $0.0315 in 2024 — equivalently, $1.00 today buys what $0.03 bought in 1913. Two independent CPI sources (rateinflation.com: 96.8494%, inflationdata.com: 96.8440%) agree within 0.005%, both sourcing from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The result is robust to all adversarial challenges: alternative price indices, hedonic adjustments, CPI measurement debates, and the 1913-vs-1914 founding date question all fail to bring the decline below 90%. Files proof.py — Re-runnable Python verification script proof.md — Structured proof report proof_audit.md — Full verification audit trail proof_narrative.md — Plain-language summary proof.json — Machine-readable structured data Generated by Proof Engine v0.9.0.