As long as you're working or earning money in some form, your salary should adjust for inflation so an annual rate of inflation of 3% or whatnot shouldn't be a problem. Of course, you also don't want to hold all your money in a savings account or your checking account, that's why it's a good idea to invest in a portfolio of stocks and bonds. Historical returns of these assets have outpaced inflation considerably, even if it misses the mark on the occasional year or two. If people are unable to save any money throughout a lifetime of working, then I'm sorry, but it's not the fault of inflation. It's a matter of personal saving.
You're a little off the mark there, buddy. Yearly inflation in the USA would be 8-10% per year if it were calculated in the same way that it was when Carter was president. The ShadowStats guy has done a lot of work in that area. There are a lot fewer stocks and bonds* that will outpace inflation when you consider that not only is the figure itself jerry-rigged, but it affects different income levels in vastly different ways, which I shall explain:
Food and gas prices might be 50% of op's dad's income, but it might be 5% of Mitt Romney's income. So to say " 'inflation' is '3%' " means one thing to Mitt Romney and another thing to op's dad, whose purchasing power has declined a lot more than Mitt Romney's has - solely becuase more of his purchases are the things that aren't included in inflation calculations because they're "too volatile" (read between the lines there).
One function of an official price inflation figure is to determine how the
average consumer's purchasing power is affected, and in that regards, it absolutely fails. Real inflation in Venezuela earlier this year was estimated to be up to 35% YoY, but the government still *insisted* it was 10%. In the USSA, the government may insist that inflation is <2%, but the purchasing power of your average family is going down by a lot more than 1-2% every year, so we've already lost one of the most important functions of such a metric. Now it's just another excuse to say "Everything's OK, you get your 3% raise each year so stop whining about price increases."
Someone who's making $500,000 per year won't be affected so much by a tripling of food and energy prices over a long (or short) period. They might notice, and they might get mildly annoyed. But they aren't going to notice as much as the family that lives on $50,000/year or less. They might get a 3% raise each year too but it's not going to do diddley-squat if the things they spend 20, 30, 40% of their income on (higher % the lower the income is) are increasing by 25%, 50%, 100% or more over the space of a single decade.
Your response sounds like economic academia, i.e. "everything works the way it should be, don't worry, "inflation" is only <2%, so a 3% yearly raise should cover it, and if you can't save money there's something wrong with you, not the economy."
*And finally, for lower income brackets, getting into traditional investing markets is sometimes not a financially viable option. The small amount that they'd be able to invest would hardly be worth the broker fees, the hassle, etc. Even platforms designed to lower the barrier of entry (e-trade, etc) still have a tiny barrier of entry, and the most impoverished families (the number of which are growing) can barely put food on the table, let along scrape off enough worth investing in a traditional market. Trying to buy one $13 stock each week, but there's a $4 fee for each trade? Not gonna help. This is another reason why Bitcoin is great. I started off dutifully investing $20 a week or so which was all I could afford at the time. Now I have lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, of money. Not that it will work this way for everyone, but at least I was able to put it somewhere where not only did it offset the <2% 'official inflation figure' (that doesn't apply to me since my purchases are heavily weighted towards food and gas,) but it offset the food and gas inflation, and quite a bit more. Even if it were only able to offset food and gas inflation in addition to the bullshit figures released by the likes of Bernanke, it would help a lot more people than traditional currencies and markets.
P.S. the dow jones hasn't hit an [INFLATION ADJUSTED] ATH, at least not last I checked. A lot of people forget this. And that's with official inflation figures. Considering real inflation, the markets are even more miserable.