I think if would have been more efficient and accurate for chess.com to impose the USCF form of determining a person's rating. (you have to play 24 games of which after each you get a temporary rating of either 400 points higher- for a win, 400 points lower- for a loss or the same rating as your opponent for a draw). I believe this would weed out the rating inflation on chess.com. 1200 to start is too high. More than half the people listed at 1200 or higher are not at that level.

What do you think?

I think like most online places they use a glicko formula which is more accurate than the USCF formula. Ratings only have meaning in relation to the pool of players that are playing in that system. The ratings will always be inflated here in relation to the USCF and FIDE.

Ratings are only meaningful compared to each other -- it's the rating difference between two players that has a meaning. And only within the same group -- if you have a group of players on a different website, or country or whatever, using the same system but not intermingling - then the comparison is again meaningless.

As an absolute value, ratings have no meaning. Add 6000 to each chess.com member's rating, let them start at 7200, and they'd be exactly as correct as they are now.

My current chess.com rating is 1789, USCF is 1787.

 I'd say that is as consistent as it gets. =)

My current chess.com rating is 1553 (after some really awful losses -my own fault incidentally- following the live chess 2 reset when there were massive point swings) my current USCF rating is 1853. I have found that my chess.com rating usually is about 100 points lower than my USCF. Not sure why but possibly it's from playing anyone who sits ...and everyone here starts at 1200 which means I could get a really strong 1200 player. Ratings at the end of the day don't mean a whole lot anyway. Eventually I'll recover the lost points.

The term inflation also only has meaning in relation to the pool of players that are playing in that system.

No, I've seen some players with higher USCF rating and lower chess.com rating.