Not disagreeing at all with you on minimum wage, you’re absolutely correct. These are average wages across the whole economy (or non supervisory wages or something but close enough). If you plotted real minimum wage vs where we used to be it’s waaaayyy lower now. It’s nowhere near kept up with increased cost of living (certainly federal, not sure if any state has increased theirs enough to compensate).
If you’re interested in more on how the cpi works or what is or isn’t included and some of the arguments both ways, I found this to be an interesting read that summarizes a lot of the controversies about the cpi figures well.
Not disagreeing at all with you on minimum wage, you’re absolutely correct. These are average wages across the whole economy (or non supervisory wages or something but close enough). If you plotted real minimum wage vs where we used to be it’s waaaayyy lower now. It’s nowhere near kept up with increased cost of living (certainly federal, not sure if any state has increased theirs enough to compensate).
If you’re interested in more on how the cpi works or what is or isn’t included and some of the arguments both ways, I found this to be an interesting read that summarizes a lot of the controversies about the cpi figures well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/technology/inflation-measure-cpi-accuracy.html
Or archive version https://archive.is/zvtPw
Though be aware that article is from a year and a half ago, so none of the inflation figures it gives in it are current.