Real Hourly Wages Have Risen Less Than A Penny A Year Since 1973

Let's investigate how much inflation has eaten wage growth since 1964.

BLS Notes

Hourly wage data for production and nonsupervisory workers dates to 1964. 

The data for all private workers only dates to 2006.

The BLS uses slightly different deflators for each series, CPI-U (the standard CPI) for all workers, and CPI-W for production workers.

Key Points

• In nominal terms, the production and nonsupervisory worker made $4.05 per hour in 1973. Today that worker makes $26.40 per hour. 
• Accounting for inflation, using 1982-1984 as the base rate, a worker made $9.38 in 1973 and makes only $9.63 per hour today.
• In 45 years, real wages have risen by $0.25. That's just over half a penny per hour each year.
• Between 1964 and 1973 workers came out ahead. Since then it's practically $0 and that assumes you believe the CPI is not understated.

It's Criminal

For the past decade, until now, the Fed has been begging for higher inflation. 

The promotion of inflation is purposeful theft for the benefit of banks, the wealthy, and asset holders. 

The poor and those on fixed income suffer the most from Fed policy.

Every Measure of Real Interest Rates Shows the Fed is Out of Control

All the bottom half of the nation has to show for Fed policy is the third asset bubble since 2000.

Bad things happen when the Fed ignores asset bubbles. And the way to ignore asset bubbles is to pretend housing, land prices, speculation in Bitcoin, and insane stock market valuations are not inflation.

It's difficult to state the inflation effect on stocks or Bitcoin but housing is one most human beings easily see even though the Fed and Martian economists can't.

On December 29, I commented Every Measure of Real Interest Rates Shows the Fed is Out of Control

My housing-adjusted CPI measure stands at 9.31%.