A closer look
If you ever wonder why your grandparents could afford to buy a massive suburban home and two cars on a part-time hardware store salary, the math absolutely backs them up. Adjusted for inflation, the actual purchasing power of the US federal minimum wage peaked historically in 1968. Since then, the cost of housing, education, and basic healthcare has violently skyrocketed while the federally mandated baseline wage stagnated into sheer irrelevance. So yes, you are quite literally working significantly harder for demonstrably less value than previous generations.
