> One of the best understandings of inflation is to use the mathematical concept of "equality" on those. They're two ways of phrasing the same thing.
They're not quite the same thing. All other things equal, if a price increase is "just" inflation then it takes the same number of hours of work to buy the car (or equivalently, the car is worth the same number of loaves of bread).
The alternative is that car prices have increased relative to other goods. This could happen through higher-quality/more featureful/bigger cars (which would be removed from the inflation calculation), or it could come because of some idiosyncratic feature of the industry like the car-chip shortage during covid.
Second, if you wrap inflation into your salary like that you are obscuring some important aspects of inflation, most especially the various lag effects that result in your salary being the last thing to update.
While understanding "purchasing power" (the term for what you are trying to describe) is important, it doesn't mean inflation is non-existent. It still has effects on savings, effects on assets, effects due to the aforementioned delays as it flows through the economy, and is in general not something you should view as any sort of "cancelling" like that, or, if you do, only as a final result, not an excuse to just wave it away like it's all just an artifact.
They're not quite the same thing. All other things equal, if a price increase is "just" inflation then it takes the same number of hours of work to buy the car (or equivalently, the car is worth the same number of loaves of bread).
The alternative is that car prices have increased relative to other goods. This could happen through higher-quality/more featureful/bigger cars (which would be removed from the inflation calculation), or it could come because of some idiosyncratic feature of the industry like the car-chip shortage during covid.