The true level of consumer inflation in the US is currently ~ 12%
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
The true level of inflation is best measured using a gold reference, even the 1990s formula used by shadowstats underestimated inflation, just not as badly as what is used today. $20 of gold in 1920 is worth about $2000 today, and you can see that before we stopped using a gold standard, the price only fluctuated between 20 to 30 dollars, then immediately went up into the hundreds of dollars as we started printing paper money not backed by gold deposits.
12% seems lower than what I see.