You don't have to tell me that the cost of living in this country is going up much faster than real income. What is surprising is that it has taken this long for it to become "newsworthy." Read an old copy of Sunset magazine where they talk about 12 oz cans of Campbell Soup. When Dreyer's Ice cream's half gallon size became 62 1/3 ounces I started wondering what the real impact of this was. The math is scary.

A question that is under reported is who benefits from under reporting the real cost of living? I know that one benefactor, intentional or not, is the Federal budget which has a number of entitlement programs (military retirement, social security, food stamps, Etc.) which are indexed to the cost of living. If the real cost of living were reported the government decifit would be much greater than it is today.

--C