Quote from: etlase3 on March 11, 2014, 07:10:18 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on March 11, 2014, 07:03:44 PM

Mine have more than doubled.

My mind is blown.

It shouldn't have. I'd wager that if you actually sat down and assessed your real costs, you'll find that your expenses have likely doubled as well, since about 2000. While gas prices have been fairly flat the past couple of years, the price of a gallon of petrol near where I live was right around $2.20 in 2008 and is $3.57 today; and has been as high as $4.09 in between. Likewise, as recently as two years ago, a gallon of propane cost me about $1.60, delivered; today it's $3.40. Granted, there are a lot of market forces going on there, including the quite un-global-warming-like winter we just had. Yet, the cost of beef or chicken at the grocery store is much more than it was a decade ago as well. The offical CPI suppresses the official inflation metric in a number of ways, one of which is to use 'substitution'. I.E., they assume, as prices rise, someone who could no longer afford beef would buy chicken instead; so they swap the price of beef for the price of chicken in the formula. There are other examples I can produce. And the cost of consumer energy needs isn't even included in the modern calculations at all, only the commercial and/or wholesale prices of those energy sources; or more specificly, the effect of the rising energy that commercial businesses pass onto their consumer prices.