America’s Cost-of-Living Crisis Is Really a Pay Crisis

Over the past 45 years, wage growth for most Americans has been halting at best, often failing to keep up with the country’s overall economic gains. The issue underpinning America’s cost-of-living crisis isn’t just rising prices. The real culprit behind America’s affordability crisis is that employers have had too much power and too little motivation to share gains. The consequences of this imbalance are clear. The economy’s productivity grew by around 73% between 1979 and 2019, but wages in the middle rose only about 23%. Here is what this means in concrete terms. A retail worker in 1979 earned about...