Why the poor can have “things” but can't escape poverty

New/used vehicle costs have certainly not decreased (although the gap has shrunk a lot). Anyone with even casual knowledge of the used car market should be able to tell you that.

Cell phone service has not gotten less expensive (maybe in terms of bytes/$, but certainly not in cost/time).

Cars and education share the common problem of easy money (via loans) creates a situation where there is too much money chasing too few goods. It's easy for prices to climb when there is no immediate impact on the buyer, if they want the product (in this case both of which are near essentials for a typical white-collar existence) they just take on more debt.

In short, there's two lines on that graph I 100% call BS on, either for being straight up false or the product of number crunching "creativity". Do I trust the rest of them? Hell no.

The currency will be set to inflate at 0-3%, hedonically adjusted, by central banks. This rate is determined by averaging out costs of a consumer basket of goods, as determined by a central bank. The bank might determine a family only needs to spend 6% budget on college and 20% TVs. The currency will inflate accordingly. This policy benefits those who hold assets that increase in nominal value, as well as those who can access near 0% interest loans.

Source: https://twitter.com/markmellman/status/462951610042564608

Note that the x-axis spans the years 2005-2014, and that the y-axis is somewhat misleading ("changes in prices relative to a 23% increase").