[raulus]

For the OP, I think your starting point is off when it comes to your analysis of price increases, particularly on cardboard.

Compared to 2019, most vintage baseball cardboard (ie the stuff most of us collect) is up at least 100%, and in some cases more like 200-300% or more. Cardboard price increases for vintage baseball over the last 3-4 years are sooooooooo much greater than inflation on everything else. And it’s not even close.

To respond to your question about why it has to be this way, while economists love to debate what drives inflation, I’m a big believer in M2 - when the supply of money goes up without a corresponding shift in the number of available goods, then prices will rise. And to avoid politics behind why M2 increased, I’ll leave it at that.