There has been steady inflation since the 70's and it has been picking up in pace in the last couple of decades. The evidence for this is easy to show: A house purchased for 200,000 dollars in the year 2000 may now be worth more than a million. It is the same house on the same sized plot of land, the the price has increased by a factor of 5.
It's not the house that changed, it's the money. The purchasing power of that money has fallen dramatically. Whatever inflation rate number you're hearing from the government has been manipulated and revised downward to hide the true figure. This is done by changing the rules of which goods and services are used to calculate the rate. If the rules used back in the 80's were applied to today's environment, inflation would be running above 10%. You'd have to check Shadow Stats for a precise figure.
The reason this figure is manipulated is that action would be required to halt the bleeding before inflation destroys all the value of the money, and that action--raising interest rates and halting government borrowing--is politically unacceptable.
Instead, interest rates are held down by money creation at the Federal Reserve. That money is used to purchase Treasury bonds issued by the U.S. government at near 0% rates. If the Fed didn't do this, no foreign government or private entity would be dumb enough to lend the U.S. government money for a 0% rate of return. The real rate would be much higher, maybe several percent higher.
The U.S. Government, most large corporations, most state governments, and most mortgage holders have incurred very, very large debts are extremely low interest rates. If the rates rise more than a percent or two, the interest on those debts becomes unpayable. It would mean national bankruptcy on all levels--national, state, corporate and personal. Because of this, the Fed can't stop backstopping the government, and they can't stop lying about the actual rate of inflation.
The reason they must lie about inflation is that a rate of 10% will halve the value of a dollar in just a few years because of the compounding effect. Real inflation is probably higher than 10% and ACCELERATING. Assets have been increasing in price for many years now, and price inflation has now noticeably crept into everyday purchases. It is not that their value is increasing, it is that you are getting more poor.
There is no way out of this trap without some kind of national or global financial reset. It won't be pretty. They can choose to allow interest rates to rise and bankrupt the nation, or they can allow inflation to burn out the value of money. Will it end in ice or will it end in fire? We'll just have to wait and see.
