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"I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel" — US cost of living has skyrocketed since 2020
(boingboing.net)
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Your using “inflation adjusted” which imo does not work.
Let’s say something costs $10 and you earn $100 a day. Then inflation comes around and it’s now $13, but your wage is $110 now.
You can use the “inflation adjusted” values to argue that it’s always been $13 in today’s money. But it’s not longer 10% of your income.
Inflation adjusted values only work when wages also go up and down with the same rate, which is obviously not true and the crux of the issue.
That's why we have "real wages" statistic so you can do that comparison. Where you adjust wages for inflation in comparison to a set point in time so they are comparable.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-in-one-chart/
This chart only goes to 2019. Real wages did dip some during the corona virus pandemic as for a time inflation was out pacing wage increases. This has since reversed though, with wage growth outpacing inflation, and real wages are now higher than they were in 2019. Anchored to 1982-1984 dollars, in December 2019 real wages were $10.96 /hr, in October 2023 they were $11.05.
So yes, as of right now inflation that occured during the pandemic has been fully accounted for and then some by the total wage growth that occured during and since. Wage growth continues to out pace inflation, so hopefully things will continue to get better. That's not to say there hasn't been a persistent problem over decades of wages getting diluted. Real wages dropped significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, remained flat in the 90s and 00s, and only really began to recover after the financial crisis in 2008. Real wages are just catching up finally to where they used to be way back in the 1970s.
2023 real wages report https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/realer.pdf
2019 real wages report https://stats.bls.gov/news.release/archives/realer_01142020.pdf
Wage growth vs inflation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
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