Wage increases in salary just means chasing higher and higher prices in a laggard way, it will “come out OK” only if you squint, and onlyin nominal numbers on paper. Monetary Inflation is a kind of tax.
The truth is ordinarily prices over time go _down_, not up, generally speaking. We’re being robbed, essentially. All sorts of jiggery-pokery is invoked to try and dance around this plain fact. Hedonistic adjustments, substituting margarine for dairy butter in the CPI.
Hell, they don’t count food, energy, or housing costs in the official inflation numbers. Anybody who claims 2% avg monetary inflation over the years is smoking their socks. Now they want to kick it into overdrive apparently.
The problem is the higher prices come long before the wage adjustments. So people fall behind in real terms.
There are a lot of versions of the Consumer Price Index produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those used for calculating Social Security and I-Bond interest rates do include energy and food costs.
I remember my I-Bonds did strange things because of a big jump in energy prices around 2006.