Having said that, US inflation for the last two decades has been at or below 3.0%.

http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation/DecadeInflation...

You clearly don't buy your own gas, food, or clothes.

Where I live we call it petrol and buy it by the litre, not the gallon.

So, no I'm not up to speed on the cost of living in the USA ;)

Where do you find these risk-free instruments that yield 5%?

Here in Australia there are four major banks, which effectively gives them a monopoly on the entire banking sector and it's been that way for decades.

All those banks pay a 4.5% dividend and on top of that you also get capital growth on that investment.

Now while this is by no means risk free investing, unlike banks in America that are pretty much unregulated, these Australian banks are heavily regulated.

So for these institutes the term 'safe as a bank' does in fact apply.