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.
Well there was that jump when I upgraded to my McMansion in 2006.
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.
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.
We have been in severe deflation since 2008, which is the main point of my post upthread (which quoted Shadowstats).
For the moment you are not yet seeing the severity of the deflation in your daily lives because most still trust that there are a $quadrillion of fractional reserves. By 2016ish (2018 at latest) all hell will break loose.
The offical CPI suppresses
There was no statement made about the official CPI, stop red herringing.
My entire point was the official CPI was understated to hide the fact they pumped up the fractional reserves, while they simultaneously hide the fact that actual circulation of currency, i.e. velocity of M0 and MB, have fallen off the cliff (especially since 2008).
And no there isn't any hyperinflation, the Shadowstats figures only show about 8-10% per annum inflation which seems to roughly correlate with the growth in my expenses.
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.
Mathematically we can't have an average which applies to everyone. We can look at the geometric weighting of what the majority of the population spend on, and use that metric to compute a CPI which is representative of that group.
And without that hedonics bullshit of the official CPI where if a computer becomes 2X as fast, the official CPI counts that as a halving of the price of a computer! Bullshit.
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.
1.08^13 = 2.71, thus 171% increase or 2.71 times. Thus $50k would be $18k. There is a calculator on their website for computing exactly. You can get the green bar value by comparing its height in pixels (to cheat so you don't have to pay a subscription).
http://www.shadowstats.com/inflation_calculatorIt says $50k in 2014 would be $36k by BLS and $14k by SGS.
That BLS figure implies an average of 2.5% per year, which is complete bullshit. The SGS figure may be a bit too high though.
The following roughly agrees with my experience.
http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/70yearsofpricechange.htmlSo for meat:
1.075^23 = $4.89/$0.89
Thus 7.5% ≈ 8% is not far from the actual truth, at least for meat.
P.S. John Williams (proprietor of ShadowStats.com) thinks we will have hyperinflation. He is entirely mistaken. We will have severe deflation.