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Wages today are higher in real terms, not just nominal terms.
Gold is a bad metric since it's highly speculative these days. The past year especially has seen gold rise at very high rates disconnected from any actual underlying material value. If gold is your metric then Obama, Trump 1, and to a large extent even Biden were great presidential terms, while Trump 2 has been an economic catastrophe. Obviously this isn't really the case.
The idea that people are poorer today than they were 25, 50, or 100 years ago is a popular populist talking point but it's just consistently wrong.
Correct. It's connected to the devaluation of the USD, not to underlying material value. The material value is held constant, that's the point, and that's why we use it to see how real goods have changed cost, not in fake currency, but in real money.
In 1975 you had to work 11 minutes to buy a pound of ground beef. Today it's 13 minutes. How is that richer? If you want real steak, sirloin was ~15 minutes per pound in 1975 and now it's 30 minutes per pound. How is that richer? If you want to buy a brand new Ford F-150 in 1975, it costs you about 21 weeks of work, while in 2025 it costs you 31 weeks of work. How is that richer?
I have not even mentioned housing, health care, child care, or education, where costs have ballooned. You might be able to go without a F-150 or sirloin steak, but you have to live somewhere, you have to get healthcare or die, and you have to get education or you'll be poor. We have not become richer in the last 50 years, not as a whole.
Just because it's a physical good doesn't mean it's somehow "true" value in a metaphysical sense. Physical goods are just as susceptible to speculative price spirals as intangible goods. It was true for tulips and it's true for gold.
Looking at a single good like beef is also bad since it mistakes perennial supply chain issues with long term trends. It's almost exactly like the comparison in egg prices people were making against Biden, which were a short-term issue that were resolved once chicken herds recovered. Beef prices are almost guaranteed to follow a roughly similar trajectory.
Yes, there are specific goods where an hour of work in 2026 might earn you less than it did in 1975. But that's not true of the prices of things overall.
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