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what about purchasing power?



Adjusting for inflation is a representation of purchasing power.


Eeeh, better to adjust to the respective minimum wages (if your country had them at both times) or median wages (if not).


I used the BLS's consumer price index -based calculator: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

The Federal minimum wage has not changed since 2009, but the CPI captures effects like per-state minimums increasing, less people working minimum wage jobs, etc. No "adjust for inflation" calculation will capture the "pain" that every individual experiences from making a purchase, but this index is pretty close.


The issue with fancier statistics like these, is that they sweep things under the rug : https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/strikes-and-bidenomics




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