Dude, it's the detatchment of the CPI from a passive measure to a manipulatable statistic.

See: The Return Of Voodoo Economics

Then see how nonesense is consumed here: Tell Me Again How "The Rich" Don't Pay Their Fair Share

Comment could go like this:

The tax on the poor is that as the money supply has increased that their wages have not. The present set of economic stimulus measures are targeted at inducing asset inflation. Much of the assets though, like mortgage backed debt, is just a liability from one set of folks to another. The tax-take-boost is just a fractional share of the boost in the relative change in wealth of the two classes, capital and labor.

The level of personal debt, inclusive of mortgage debt, is way over the top today, in terms of sustainability. There are some rich folks that learned following the great crash that they need consumers with income (see stuff by John Kenneth Galbraith) or the game all falls down. It is like the end-game of a long family afternoon of "Monopoly."

I do not believe that the power of monetary manipulation can overcome the classic old business cycle and the certain event, who knows when, of a restoration of an equilibrium between debt and wages.

The CPI (as a funny number) fails to keep pace with the real increase in the effective money supply. The CPI is/was supposed to be just a proxy, passively measured, that matched money supply against the exchange of goods -- as reflected in the measure of production of GNP or GDP. Wages are effectively declining by about 5 percent per year -- I call this a tax on the poor that is greater than that which might accompany inflation from federal public works projects of old, like building Timberline Lodge.