Yeah good points. Using prices to measure inflation is a vague proxy - which was sort of my point. It's all a house-of-cards built on a facade of an illusion.

My real contention is when a business raises prices roughly in-line with inflation and then the un-informed public eats up the rhetoric the government/media propaganda machine feeds them, which is: cOrPoRaTe gReEd and gOuGiNg.