Can you explain that a little further? I don't see why the federal government can't put out a bond that beats inflation as well as one that matches inflation. After all, inflation is sometimes incredibly low - we had deflation in 2008-09 after all.

Inflation isn't a measure of how much debt the US federal government takes on or how much money is in circulation after all, but rather the price increases of various commodities and services.

The Keynesian view is that inflation has little to do with monetary supply. The Austrian view is it does, though there are enough real-world examples of inflation without monetary supply increases and deflation with monetary supply increases to safely say that the effect is indirect at best. At the very least, it certainly isn't a 1:1 correlation.

I think a part of the point is that there is no such thing as the measure of inflation. Every measure of inflation measures some basket of goods; what if I want to buy something else with my inflating currency? Then this measure isn't relevant for me. Also, how can we know whether prices rise due to an increase in the money supply or due to something else? Consider the following example where p, q, r, s, t, u and v all denote a certain good. m denotes the monetary good. At first, the relationship, in price, between these goods is the following:

p=2m, q=0.7m, r=1.4m, s=8m, t=0.2m, u=0.6m, v=4.5m

after a while the prices change and now the relationship is the following:

p=2.5m, q=0.5m, r=1.2m, s=7m, t=0.2m, u=2m, v=4.6m

What role has an inflation in the monetary supply played in the change in prices and what role has factors such as scarcity, difficulty of production, labor costs, etc. played in the change of prices? The answer is it's impossible to tell. Sure, you could calculate an average price change between all the goods, but who is to say that this average stems from monetary inflation and not an increase in wages or an incrase in energy costs, for example?

USG cannot conjure value out of thin air, so any "free" returns must come from changing the unit of measure. The no-risk USD instrument with the highest rate of return is where conservative money should generally end up, and thus its return is the expected monetary base expansion. And since this expansion is distributed evenly across the economy, by definition it's inflation.

When analyzing inflation in terms of prices, one must also take into account how much those prices would have otherwise dropped due to non-monetary factors such as technological and market progress. If a certain widget is 10% easier to produce than yesterday but the price remains the same due to monetary base expansion, that's a silent 10% reduction of what today's purchasing power should have been. With exponential technological progress, this term is ever-more important.