The thing is, it's all just numbers and inflation wouldn't be an issue if salaries would keep up with the rest of the market. Alas...
Salaries can't keep up due to Cantillon effect. When new money enters circulation, it does not spread uniformly among the people in the society. Think of the central bank as the source of a river, where the water begins; the wealthiest people are the closest to the source, and they get the first benefit before inflation sets in. As the water goes downstream, it spreads out to other parts of the economy, like investors and entrepreneurs. Once they get the water,
then follows middle class. So, until that point, prices have already gone up and their wages cannot be adjusted quickly enough to undo the loss.
Good point! But to add insult to injury salaries are not even adjusted according to inflation after the fact. So year after year the working class gets scammed for another fraction of a percent. And it adds up.
But I'd argue that's not a problem of inflation in itself. If new money would enter circulation from the bottom up, say via UBI, the Cantillon effect could be largely circumvented. But of course there's no profit in that so the incentives to implement such a system at a scale is pretty much nil.
$100 put into your bank account in 2019 should be worth $100 in 2024. Its not. Its 81.5$ right now. 18.5$ was stolen by "hidden tax".
The secret is that those $100 should have never been put into the bank account in the first place. Investing the same $100 into the S&P500 would have yielded you $190 as of today. That's $154 after inflation, give or take. That's no gamble either. It's simple economics. And in the end that's pretty much what the bank would have done with your money anyway, except this way you at least get a cut.
The point of inflation is not keep you underwater (though it is used this way, by means of salary-suppression as mentioned above) -- it's to keep the cash flow moving. Cash is the lifeblood of an economy, and like blood, once it stops flowing, you're in deep trouble. Put differently, fiat currencies are bad stores of value
because they are not meant to be stores of value. And I'd argue that's fine because we have alternatives for that particular problem.