Anyone pushing wage numbers is playing a game of hide the salami, and ignoring the trend towards a larger portion of income being given in forms other than money.
Yeah, but "forms other than money" mostly means healthcare, which has skyrocketed - despite the fact that other developed nations with longer live expectancies have much lower healthcare costs.
More importantly, though, the Fed graph you show is an average (the real hourly compensation one). With growing inequality, using the average hides the fact the improvement for the median worker is much lower.
Yeah, but "forms other than money" mostly means healthcare, which has skyrocketed - despite the fact that other developed nations with longer live expectancies have much lower healthcare costs.
If you feel consumers are overconsuming medicine and driving up the price, there are lots of great ways to fix that. The most effective is high deductibles (currently illegal).
I know you are aware that life expectancy is minimally related to health care consumption, so why do you bring it up?
If you have data showing that median real compensation per hour is lower, show it.
And again, since household income has not moved much (according to figures I cited), you still need to provide an explanation for why we don't seem to consume less. (Hint: the basket of goods in CPI changes and $1 of chained-CPI adjusted wages today buys more than $1 of chained CPI adjusted wages 30 years ago. I.e., CPI != inflation in the long run.)
