“The resilience of the American worker is one of the most underreported stories of the 2020s. From red tape to import taxes, successive governments have erected barriers to success. Yet America’s workers have persevered and figured out ways to prosper,” notes The Washington Post:
A new American Abundance Index…reveals the steady rise of the average worker’s purchasing power. The premise of the index is simple: how many hours do you need to work, compared to the month or year before, to be able to afford the “basket of goods,” which is a standard set of household items and services that comprise the Consumer Price Index used to calculate inflation.
The “time price” is how many hours of work it takes to purchase the basket of goods. The “abundance” is how much of the basket one hour of work can buy. The story told by the index is a very good one: since recordkeeping began, “abundance” for average private sector workers comes out to a net increase of 13.8 percent.
It increased the past year, too. The index shows the average private sector worker saw prices rise by 2.7 percent from December 2024 to December 2025, while their hourly wages grew by 3.8 percent. This means workers could work 1 percent less to buy the same basket of goods. Put differently, workers could afford 1 percent more stuff.
The reason for this is that earnings have continued to outpace inflation. So long as wages increase faster than inflation, the worker gets ahead. And it’s not just desk jobs that have enabled workers to purchase the same amount of goods and services for fewer hours worked. The gain for traditional “blue collar workers” is even higher: a historical net increase of 18.4 percent since 2006.
Despite workers significantly increasing their purchasing power over the past two decades, the past five years have taken a toll. The self-inflicted pain of printing vast sums of money during the pandemic sent the annualized inflation rate to over 9 percent in 2022, far outstripping raises. While inflation is now mostly under control, it has taken time for the gap between wages and inflation to settle, and workers are only now just catching up after their losses during those inflation-heavy years.
Real wages continue to rise despite harmful federal government policies that slow down economic growth somewhat. Joe Biden’s inflationary policies and wasteful spending did not keep the economy from growing. Trump’s counterproductive tariffs harmed manufacturing somewhat (by increasing the cost of raw materials and inputs used by manufacturers), but still did not keep the economy from growing (the U.S. economy grew 2.2% in 2025).
