A dollar is still a dollar. It’s only 18 cents in comparison to the 1970s.
In the 60’s we were making $1 per hour for work that folks today are paid about $8 per hour PLUS benefits. Pizza was 10 cents a slice.
Exactly - it’s the comparison that matters, not the tautological declaration of value.
A loaf of bread has pretty consistent value throughout US history: people have always been willing to trade about 15 minutes of mundane labor (like floor sweeping) for a loaf of bread. In gold-standard days, the medium for exchange in that transaction was around a dime, aka 0.0001 oz of gold (someone check my math). Today, that transaction is around $2, which is still worth roughly 0.0001 oz of gold. The alleged value assigned to a “dollar” changes over time due to fiat and convention, but whatever that number is still is just a medium to exchange 15 minutes of floor sweeping for a loaf of bread.
Unfortunately, most people are so fixated on the term “dollar” that they fail to comprehend what could be called the Law Of Financial Relativity: it’s the value of mundane goods/services which is fixed, not the value of the currency; it’s not the price on the tag that goes up, it’s the value of the currency that goes down.