Historically every paper currency goes to zero. Gold in worst case just preserves your buying power rather than seeing it whittled away by inflation. Nevermind the governments cooked CPI numbers..real inflation is around 13% right now. The gov stopped publishing the M3 numbers March 2006 so we have no idea what's really going on anymore. This guy is good at extrapolating from other sources:
http://www.shadowstats.com