There is no doubt that a lot of these discretionary consumer items such as you mention like christmas gifts are much cheaper to obtain today than they were before the recession. However this doesn't illustrate an accurate picture of the inflation rate despite the FED wanting you to believe that we are in a low inflation environment. As others have posted the CPI number deliberately leaves out items that are considered (volatile) such as food prices and fuel prices. These are some of the biggest every day reoccurring items for consumers that are NOT DISCRETIONARY.
Personally my cost of living goes up year after year. Gas up here in Canada is now never any lower than a buck/litre for regular which converted for us gallons would be roughly 2.64 per gallon. My municipal property tax bill goes up a minimum of 2.5% per year. I can support your argument that food prices are not going up because food suppliers seem to always have sales on and keep discounting items for weekly flyers. I havn't noticed much price inflation in my grocery bills the last few years. However another area where I feel price inflation is hitting people hard is in various specialized labor costs. For example various trades people that homeowners need to call on for home repairs, auto mechanics, etc. This goes back to your statement that cars are cheaper and free to finance (which isn't true, financing anything has a cost). I can accept that cars are actually cheaper today than they were before the recession, however the maintenance costs appear to go higher and higher all the time. Everything from vehicle registration, gas, mechanics, parking, insurance, all has gone up for me year after year. It NEVER gets cheaper only more expensive.
I have to guess that in the US some of the biggest inflationary costs down the road will be healthcare insurance premiums since the baby boomers will soon all be sick and in hospitals, after that there won't be a big fat squishy money base for the insurace parasites to keep tapping for those premiums and everyone who is younger will already be broke or won't be able to afford the higher premiums due to the lack of healthy people to pay for them. Healthcare is socialist and evil anyway so hopefully the insurance parasites will be able to suck what's left of America's middle class life force before the patient can be thrown off to the side of the road and left for the government to clean up.
