Paychecks haven’t kept up with the cost of living for generations.
Where I live jobs paying 20/hr are common but a studio apartment costs over 2,000/month.
Hard to live on that job even at a basic level.
“Paychecks haven’t kept up with the cost of living for generations.”
Correct.
I crunched the numbers for southern CA a while back and it turned out that the per square foot housing costs closely matched the rate of inflation.
It was wages that were not increasing fast enough to cover inflation over the past few decades—not even close.