“I would like to mean and median pay, compared to previous years and adjusted for inflation.
I suspect we would find that, even though more people are working, they are earning less.”
I am 74 so I have some idea of what the REAL inflation has been and it is far higher than anything the government will own. Everything you need to know is contained in this one story I have posted many times on FR. When I finished high school I went straight to Navy boot camp and by age 23 I had an honorable discharge, a Navy electronics certificate and was working in the manufacturing engineering department of a bearing factory. I was driving a new Mustang and renting a three bedroom brick house. I had a salary which allowed me to pay for the Mustang with about six months wages. I was asked point blank by a sixty year old woman in the office, “What is wrong with you?” She made it sound as if I was worthless trash. The reason for her rude question was that she had learned that, at age 23, I was still single!
In those days it was considered that a 23 year old male should have a wife, a mortgage and AT LEAST one child. That is how things really were in 1967. Think about that and tell me how it fits with the idea that everything is just great now.
I was a kid in the late 60’s and I remember 10 cent candy bars, 30 cent gasoline, and model kits for a dollar.
I remember whole chickens for 25 cents per pound. Hamburger wasn’t much more expensive.
I have watched prices on important stuff (food, shelter, medicine) increase at an amazing pace and it seems to be accelerating.
The things that have been done our currency should be punishable by a slow, painful, and humiliating death.