I AM SCOLDED IN SERIOUS OFFICIAL TERMINOLOGY THAT IT DOESN'T COST ANY MORE

The other day at Albertson's supermarket I was imagining I might get out for under a hundred dollars, but that was so foolish of me.  You see, I'd somehow forgotten it was 2012 and not 2011.  The cheapest house brand cheddar cheese chunk was up $2 dollars over what I paid last year.  The pack of sticks of string cheese was up from $6.99 to $9.99.  The turkey Keilbasa, on sale for $3.99 looked like it was only up about a dollar until I realized it was a little light in the hand--the same 16 ounce package now only weighed 12 ounces.  This new technique, designed to soften the blow of much higher prices, is popular with snacks like Triscuits and Wheat Thins, as well.  Cereals, on the other hand, appear in so many different sizes that they hide their inflated prices in a bewildering flurry of choices.  Rye bread that used to be $2.50 for the half loaf, went up to $3.50 and now is over $4.00.
(I guess that last one deserves an exclamation point, but let's say the rye crop was eaten by pests or outer space aliens, so disregard the abnormal surge in rye bread.
The  mood is, if not jovial, at least calm, and prices on items  are engineered  to seem as they are not:  For instance, at Pavillions, a branch of VONs supermarkets, the savings on the various cuts of beef are astounding.  It is sometimes  possible to buy T-bone steaks, bone in, at 4.99 in the economy pack.  Since they print the "REGULAR PRICE" on the label, it is easy to see that five pounds of steak, regularly priced at $50, can be had for $24.95, not counting tax, which is nearly ten percent in Los Angeles, where I live and buy my food.  Astounding, but confusing at the same time.  If memory serves (and in this case it does) a slim year ago, the econo-pak price was $3.99 per pound.  My salary didn't go up by 25% and my social security (that I contributed into for 40 plus years and am supposed to be ashamed to accept) didn't go up at all. 
I suppose I would shuffle along with the rest of the sheep, but something has been puzzling me, and I find myself out of step, confused, looking for a simple answers to questions that shouldn't be all that difficult:  If the prices on fundamental foodstuffs keep jerking up, up, up month after month after month, then why has the government you and I elected declared there was no inflation in the 2nd quarter of 2012?  And why did they claim inflation was way, way below 10% in all of last year?  And why did they declare there was no increase in the cost of living in the two years before that? 
I think something is wrong, but we both have to admit I am just a sample of one little lamb who has lost his way.  Perhaps my math is wrong, or perhaps I am just buying food on expensive days or shopping at the wrong stores.   Perhaps there are cheaper ways to buy food and the government is adding those into the mix.  Maybe spoiled or tainted food counts in the official tally.  Surely such food would be cheaper.  No, seriously, I heard that for some time now the official federal calculations have been allowing a substitution of cheaper grades and cuts of meat, rather than the old fashioned idea that cuts of meat are defined as this or that because they are different in taste, texture and so on.  For instance, if a pound of hamburger meat has the same calculated amount of nutrition as a pound of filet mignon, our trusty inflation fighters can switch to the cheaper ground meat in their calculations, and hence squeeze the flation formula back down to zero.  I know, 'flation' is not a real word.  But when inflation is not a true figure or a real calculation, I think we the sheeple should try to find other words to describe the process.  After all, in the direction our society is being shepherded, what is the real value  of mutton, anyway?