What I have difficulty understanding is how, in the face of all the price increases in the items I use most, does the rate of inflation remain so low?
Some of the things that affect the published rate are the base year, various weight adjustments, seasonal adjustments, and something called "Intervention Analysis" seasonal adjustment, which is apparently used to discard spikes and other events that someone judges to be non-typical. Is it possible that someone is fooling around with these adjustments to make the picture look better than it really is?