The pundits are at it again, fretting over the latest poll numbers showing that President Biden is losing in the key swing states, especially those like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with heavy concentrations of working-class voters. With inflation down, unemployment at record lows, wages up, and infrastructure projects popping up across the country, the pundits wonder why aren’t these workers thrilled with the economy?

The not-so-subtle implication is that American workers are too dumb to realize that wages are rising faster than the higher prices they see all around them. Even Robert Reich, who I truly admire and hate to call out, recently wrote in his Substack that “wages are rising for American workers,” and he means real wages—wages after taking inflation into account.

Unfortunately for workers, Reich is wrong, as are so many other pundits who keep repeating the same erroneous point.

The St. Louis Federal Reserve has the go-to database that tracks the average weekly earnings of private sector production and nonsupervisory employees. These workers make up 82.2 percent of the total U.S. full-time workforce, and 65.4 percent of all civilian employment, full and part time. If wages are going up for American workers, they should be going up for this very large segment of the working class.

But wages, after inflation, have gone down, not up, since 2020.

Let’s do the math.

The “Actual Wages” column shows the average weekly wages (from the FED data base) that workers received each year, not counting the impact of inflation.

The “Inflated Dollars” column shows those same weekly wages recalculated into April 2024 dollars. (This column is created by plugging the actual wages into the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator.) The rate of inflation in 2020 was only 1.2 percent. In 2021, it jumped to 4.7 percent, then 8.0 percent in 2022, and 4.1 percent in 2023. It took it’s toll on the buying power of wages.

Inflated Dollars shows how much money it would take today to match what the average weekly wage could purchase back then.

For example, in December 2020, it would take $1,035.80 in today’s money to buy what $860.47 bought then. As wages go up year by year, what those wages can buy changes based on how much........

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