It's funny because you look at these figures, you look at real estate prices, you look at stock prices, and you think, wait we are in a double digit inflationary environment!

Actually what is inflationary is the activities of the middle/upper-middle class (college, housing, stocks, etc), which are of course underrepresented in the CPI indices. The combination of the never ending debt bubble and quantitative easing has created a very localised inflation.