/biz/ - Business & Finance

Good evening gentlemen. Please see the attached image in which I have adjusted the prices in the image provided by the OP for the progressive devaluation of the U.S. dollar between 1976 and the present and provided the approximate current American prices for comparison. Notably, housing has kept up with inflation, but rent prices have soared by more than 50%. Wages are lower by a sixth. Automobiles are nearly twices as expensive. Along with the very high prices of tuition and movie tickets, the average price of consumer goods seems to have increased at a greater rate than the given inflation index. The unevenness seems to imply that the inflation index underestimates the true state of inflation, which means that real incomes have fallen by an even larger amount. The close correspondence of gasoline and stampage can be explained by the role of political determinants in their price as compared to other consumer goods given that much of their consumption is in the corporate sector which has increasingly exerted its influence on the legislature over the past decades.