The CPI is useless. It has been massaged and manipulated by ever administration since LBJ, and for good reason. Payments to entitlement programs, like SS, are tabbed to the CPI. CPI is up, gov has to pay more out.

When the CPI is showing higher inflation figures than is comfortable, they simply change the way it's calculated. For example, housing prices have been left out for the past few years. If it wasn't inflation would be shown to be rampant. Instead they subsituted the price your house could rent for - a figure that hasn't kept up with home prices.

They make use of subsitution in many other areas. If the price of beef steak rises too much, they replace it with hamberger meat. The rational is that people would switch.

They use hedonics. They measure some things by their supposed productivity. For example, with a computer. A computer you can purchase for $2000 today is much more powerful than a computer purchased 5 years ago, therefore this is given much more weight in calculating the CPI. Even though the new computer is accomplishing much the same thing the old one did.

The CPI is pure scam, a scam most fall for. Inflation is nothing more than the amount of dollars in the system. More dollars in the system ultimately results in higher prices. More dollars chasing the same amount, or fewer, assets. The gov used to publish M3 figures which show the amount of dollars in the economy. They stopped doing that last march because it became an embarrassment. It showed how the gov is pumping the system full of trillons of dollars essentially created out of air.

If you want a real gauge of inflation, simply look at the cost of a postage stamp, hamberger or loaf of bread, or gold. Gold is an excellent barometer, it was selling at $260 in 1999 and now is $760, an increase of 200% in that time.

What's next, possibly hyperinflation.