Inflation? Only If You Look At Food, Water, Gas, Electricity And Everything ElseMichael Snyder Perhaps if the highly manipulated numbers that they quote us were real, everything would be fine. But of course the way that the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than 20 times since the 1970s, and at this point it bears so little relation to reality that it is essentially meaningless. Anyone that has to regularly pay for food, water, gas, electricity or anything else knows that inflation is too high. In fact, if inflation was calculated the same way that it was back in 1980, the inflation rate would be close to 10 percent right now. But you would never know that listening toFederal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. In the video posted below, you can listen to her telling the media that there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about After all, she reminds many people of a sweet little grandmother. But the reality of the matter is that she is simply not telling us the truth. Everywhere we look, prices are aggressively moving higher. Just the other day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the price index for meat, poultry, fish, and eggs has just soared to a new all-time high. This is something that I have repeatedly warned would happen. Just check out this article and this article. And it isnt just meat prices that are going up. One of the largest coffee producers in the entire world just announced that it is going to be raising coffee pricesby 9 percent Not that coffee isnt expensive enough already. It absolutely stuns me that some people are willing to pay 3 dollars for a cup of coffee. I still remember the days when you could get a cup of coffee for 25 cents. Also, I cant get over how expensive groceries are becoming these days. Earlier this month I took my wife over to the grocery store to do some shopping. We are really ramping up our food storage this summer, and so we grabbed as much stuff on sale as we could find. When we got our cart to the register, I was expecting the bill to be large, but I didnt expect it to be over 300 dollars. And remember, this was just for a single shopping cart and we had consciously tried to grab things that were significantly reduced from regular price. I almost felt like asking the cashier which organ I should donate to pay the bill. Sadly, this is just the beginning. Food prices are eventually going to go much, much higher than this. According to CNBC, one recent report warned that your water bill will likely increase in the coming months Of even greater concern is what is happening to gas prices. According to Bloomberg, the price of gasoline hasnt been this high at this time of the year for six years And the conflicts in Iraq, Ukraine and elsewhere could potentially send gas prices screaming far higher. In fact, T. Boone Pickens recently told CNBC that if Baghdad falls to ISIS that the price of a barrel of oil could potentially hit $200. Of course the big oil companies are not exactly complaining about this. This week energy stocks are hitting record highs, and further escalation of the conflict in Iraq will probably send them even higher. Meanwhile, a bipartisan Senate proposal (that means both Democrats and Republicans) would raise the gas tax by 12 cents a gallon over the next two years. Our politicians have such good timing, dont they? Ugh. And our electricity rates are going up too. The electricity price index just seta brand new record high and there are no signs of relief on the horizon If our paychecks were increasing at the same rate as inflation, perhaps most families would be able to weather all of this. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. As I wrote about recently, median household income in the U.S. is now about 7 percent lower than it was in the year 2000 after adjusting for inflation. And if realistic inflation numbers were used instead of the government-manipulated ones, it would look a lot worse than that. Inflation is a hidden tax that all of us pay, and it is systematically eviscerating the middle class. So what are prices like in your neck of the woods? Is your family feeling the pain of inflation? Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. 