So it seems that your memory is suspect afterall. Gas may have been in the low $2s in 2008, but it was above $4 in 2007. Perhaps you should look into the reasons why it was so cheap in 2008? Because it does not make your case at all.
At my age, my memory should always be suspect.
There was no statement made about the official CPI, stop red herringing. Shadowstats is just as big of a pile of bs; pointing out the flaws of some other flawed metric does not make Shadowstats not flawed. Besides, all it is doing is obviously just adding 5% on to the CPI, there is no actual metric.
Well, I can accept the argument that Shadowstats can still be flawed. I'm just of the opinion that their methods are a bit more open, and their biases a bit less suspect.
And I don't have the data points, but if we assume roughly 8% inflation since 2000 according to shadowstats, that means there has been ~150% inflation in 14 years. Someone making $50k today is the same as someone making $20k in 2000.
You do have a good point there, but also a great many things besides have changed during those same 14 years to mitigate the effects. (I'm not really talking about price inflation, so much as using that as an example since that is what the CPI measures.) I'm mostly talking about monetary base inflation, which has been counteracted, to a great extent, by the debt destruction during 2007-2009 (mostly felt in the crash of houseing prices) and other smaller effects, such as the average increase in gas mialage and the decrease in average miles driven per year by Americans. The rise of ridesharing services like zipcar really are having an outsized impact on the economy, permmitting urban millinials to commute by public transit with a ready access to a personal vehicle whenever neccessry.