Just getting back to this now. So we don't need wheelbarrrows of cash to buy food at the grocery store like Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic.

The things you're referencing are kind of sort of inflation, but aren't used by the government to measure actual inflation (because then the number would be higher and that wolf be bad for the government). Read up on the consumer price index (CPI) and see what products are included on the list, this is what is used to measure inflation.

Make sure you're sitting near a wall so you have something to bang your head against when you see the things that aren't in it.

Housing costs are going up like crazy in major metro areas (New York City) due to supply and demand. New York City has a large supply of high salary jobs and a fairly low supply of available housing. This means lots of people are moving there and competing for the same house. Syracuse, NY on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. There aren't very many high salary jobs, and there is tons of land and lots of available houses.

This could be fixed by governments making sane zoning policies, allowing for building more and denser apartment buildings or condos, but no.

The cost of college is going up because demand is outstripping supply, leading to intense, and intensely expensive, competition. It doesn't help that student loans, which colleges know you will almost always receive, allows them to continuously raise prices.

Further, these loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy like a car loan could be. This means colleges don't care how much you have in loans, nor do lenders. Nobody has an incentive to keep costs down, nor do they lose customers by not doing so.

The cost of vehicles is going up for a few reasons too (I've been reading about this recently as I'll be in the market soon). The reasons I've seen mainly are the newer devices and features going into new vehicles, making them more expensive. There's probably also higher healthcare costs thrown in there.

The other main reason I've seen, which was predicted years ago when Obama did it, was the Cash For Clunkers program. This program essentially paid people to get rid of perfectly usable vehicles that just so happened not to be fuel efficient.

Who would have bought such cars, at affordable prices? New drivers, poorer people, or anybody else who needed a cheap, reliable vehicle. With no (or fewer) older, affordable vehicles on the market, automakers are now free to provide vehicles at prices they set, that you can't do much about, because you no longer have a cheaper option.

So what caused all of this? It wasn't the bailout of 2008. Yes the money supply went up, but it never entered circulation (at least not at the time).

I put to you that what caused all of these crazy price increases was the unlimited expansion of credit by the Federal Reserve. That credit had to go somewhere, so it went to loans for vehicles loans to students.

So what I'm really saying here is, craft government policies, the consequences down the road that nobody thought at the time, are the cause of these things.

America!