In America, You Can Work Hard, Play By the Rules, and Still Get Screwed

[hfojvt]

3. funny thing about time

I spent so many years working for much less than $10.55 an hour. So that still kinda sounds like a decent wage to me. I mean for a couple of years I made less than $5.4 an hour at a factory, then I made $5.5 an hour as a janitor, then $7.15 an hour, then $7.25 and then $8.50. So when I got $10.69 an hour, I thought I was doing pretty good.

Then I checked the inflation calculator

1994 - $5.40 2015 - $8.68
1998 - $7.15 2015 - $10.45
1999- $7.25 2015 - $10.37
2001 - $8.50 2015 - $11.44
2002 - $10.69 2015 - $14.16

To me, that does not seem all THAT long ago. But it is hard for me to adjust my thinking.

$10.69 was a decent wage in 2002, but it isn't so much in 2015. Now you need $14 plus to equal that old $10.69. Or put another way, $10.55 today is only $7.96 in 2002.

Still hard for me to wrap my head around, what a mere decade of fairly low inflation can do to the value of a ten dollar bill.