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Wages saw a decline since the 1980s. Minimum wage just as well as almost any other. Hell, by a reasonable PCE measure, even the president is making substantially less. The government has of course solved this problem. One, the actual amounts didn't go down, they simply didn't keep pace with inflation. And as actual measures (ie. "Big Mac index" type indices) kept going down, they were systematically removed from tracking by the FED. So the government can claim that they didn't in fact go down by a factor of 3. In reality nobody has lost any wages you see, and the fact that a fast food worker's (esp. immigrant ones) "apartment" (room is a more apt description generally) today is tiny, looks barren and has absolutely nothing in it worth anything, or the issue that their cars are invariably beaters. Well that was the case for lowest-level jobs in the 1980s as well, wasn't it ? Wait ... no it wasn't. First of all, they owned houses and cars. But you see, according to the fed's measures of inflation everything is about the same. And of course it is. You see, people today only use about a third of the housing as people of the 1980s. That must be because people now ... euhm ... are about 1/3rd the size of back then ? They also only use 1/3rd transport (fuel, public transport, ...) ... now there's some small justification for that, as a gallon of gasoline goes a lot further now, but still. |