Not really. Real wages were already 'way behind the cost of living and haven't caught up.And yet, we can see that real wages continue to grow (i.e. wage growth outpaces inflation), especially at the lower rungs as of late.
Don't look at "inflation" numbers. That's a result of cherry picking statistics. Look instead of how many hours of labor it takes to purchase specific vital necessities and how that number has changed over time.
For instance, take a college education. When I started as a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, the federal minimum wage was $1.25 an hour and college tuition was $25 per semester hour. Working part-time (20 hours a week) at minimum wage, I could pay off a semester's tuition during that same semester. Today at the University of Oklahoma, tuition is $400 per credit hour; it would take $20 an hour working part-time for a student today to do as well as I did back then.
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