Why The Flyover Zone Is Hurting: Bubble Finance Is Strictly For The Bicoastal Elites | Stockman

``This is important because based on the regular CPI, the official data implies that real hourly wages have risen by nearly 1% per annum since this turn of the century. So all things equal, households should have more financial resources to purchase real consumer goods... By contrast, the CPI sub-index for services was rising by 2.7% per annum during the last 16 years, implying no gain in real wages at all. And even that includes the distorting impact of the OER. If you substitute the market based index for housing rents we display in the first chart above, it is likely that services purchased by the average household have been inflating at upwards of 3% per year during this century, meaning that real wages have been steadily shrinking.''