I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the official inflation statistics are total hogwash. If rent has risen faster than inflation, and food has risen faster than inflation, and medical care, education, gas, and trips to Disneyland have risen faster than inflation... I mean, what do we call that? Inflation inflation? By definition we're supposed to be looking at the value of money such that the cost of all those things stay constant. The numbers are cooked. Maybe certain kinds of consumer goods which were manufactured overseas have gotten cheaper in real terms, but that doesn't cancel out the currency getting debased.
