I was gonna title this "And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice" and then write "Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again" here, but I'm not sure if that comes off like gloating and that's honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a measure of average wage growth right? I think it's possible that there are big variations between geographic regions and industries and income, so for some people wage growth more than outpaced inflation but for a lot of others it didn't.
Here's the median, in inflation-adjusted dollars:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/
It bombed in 2022 and then went back up. It'll be higher in 2024 than it ever was, and it'll probably keep going up until anywhere from 0 to 2 years into Trump's presidency, and then it'll bomb again much harder as everything goes completely to shit. The normal cycle would be that it gets handed back over to a Democrat in 2028, he spends the first 2-3 years of his presidency fixing things from the previous Republican's disaster as happened in 2009-2012 and in 2021-2022, and then during the next election everyone blames that 2-3 years on the Democrat and says the Republicans are better with money.
We're about to go so far off the map that it seems unlikely for that cycle to happen this time, but that would be the normal cycle.