Inflation is not a price increase — that's the symptom. Inflation is an expansion of the money supply, and it acts as a silent, regressive, perpetual tax on every dollar you save. The official rate hides the real damage. Let's measure it honestly.
Enter how much you have today. The calculator shows what it will be worth in real terms across the years ahead — at the actual rate the dollar is being diluted.
CPI (Consumer Price Index) measures the change in price of a basket of consumer goods chosen by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The basket and the methodology have been revised dozens of times — almost always in ways that produce a lower number. It excludes the things whose prices are most affected by money printing: housing (replaced by a synthetic "owner's equivalent rent"), assets like stocks and Bitcoin, education, and healthcare in their full form. It also uses "hedonic adjustments" — if your laptop got faster, the BLS may report its price as falling even if you paid more.
M2 money supply growth measures something the government cannot massage: the actual rate at which dollars are being created. Since 1960, M2 has grown at an average of roughly 7% per year. Since 2020, it briefly spiked above 25%. This is the rate at which your dollar is being diluted at the source — before any "basket" gets in the way.
Think of it this way: if a printer prints 7% more dollars this year and the economy produces 2% more goods, the natural result is that prices in dollars rise about 5% — but only on average. Some prices rise much faster (housing, equities, scarce assets), and some prices are held down by external deflationary forces like cheap manufacturing and AI (electronics, services). CPI averages these together and reports a misleadingly tame number. M2 tells you what the money is actually doing.
Inflation is regressive. It falls hardest on the people with the fewest assets to defend themselves with.
Salaries adjust slower than prices. Every year your raise lags behind the real rate of money creation, you get a real pay cut even if the number went up.
Money in a checking account loses value at the full inflation rate. A "high-yield" savings account paying 4% in a 7% inflation environment is still losing 3% per year in real terms.
Pensions and annuities priced in dollars decades ago are now worth a fraction of what was promised. Social Security adjustments use CPI, which understates the real loss.
House prices, stocks, and Bitcoin all rise as the money supply expands. Anyone trying to acquire assets is racing against the money printer — and the printer never sleeps.
The same expansion that costs savers their purchasing power transfers wealth to anyone who already owns scarce assets — real estate, stocks, businesses, gold, and Bitcoin. New money flows into asset markets first (the Cantillon effect), pushing prices up before the new dollars trickle out into wages and consumer goods.
This is why the gap between asset owners and wage earners widens every decade. It's not a market failure. It's the system working as designed. The defense is to own the assets, not the cash.