American Workers Are Doing Well Overall, But the Biden Years Sucked

The Washington Post editorial board has a good piece up today about some new data put out by the Cato Institute. What the data is looking at is purchasing power. Over time, workers are caught in a balance between rising inflation and rising wages. 

This data is used to calculate something called the “time price” which is the amount of working time needed to purchase a standard basked of goods. Here’s how the Post explained it.

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 methodology describes “abundance” as the amount of the basket of goods that one hour of work can buy. So, obviously, abundance can be going up or down depending on inflation and wages.

Using this method we find that the overall story for US workers looks pretty good. Since 2006, abundance is up nearly 14 percent.

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… pic.twitter.com/glHp2xsw7x

— Marian L Tupy (@Marian_L_Tupy) February 6, 2026

That’s for all US workers, but breaking out blue-collar workers you find their “abundance” has increased even more, just over 18 percent. In the last year alone the index is up about 1 percent for all workers:

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.

But there is a catch. The increase in abundance hasn’t been a consistent line. The past five years have been tough thanks to high inflation.

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.

Americans continue to rank affordability as a top concern and do not believe the government is doing enough to address the cost of living.

In short, the Biden years sucked and we’re just climbing out of that hole. Here’s the accompanying graph.

To be fair, we’ve been headed in the right direction since mid-2022 but many people correctly sensed that buying power was still down relative to where they were pre-pandemic. There was a debate in 2024 about the “vibecession” with some on the left arguing the economy was doing well (Bidenomics!), but that people were being talked out of believing the good numbers by an eco-system of right-wing pundits. In other words, people stubbornly felt things were bad even though they really weren’t. That was the argument at the time. The chart above seems to offer a pretty strong rebuttal to that argument in the form of evidence that many workers were justifiably still feeling behind in 2024.

The irony here is that the downturn in abundance is the result of government overspending (and the pandemic) both of which caused inflation to surge. And yet, some of the people who’ve been capitalizing on the “affordability” message lately are socialists like Zohran Mamdani who seem eager to push for a lot more government spending (free buses, free child care, free everything!). 

As I’ve been saying for a while now, Mamdani found the right message the problem is he’s not ideologically equipped to solve any of the problems he identified. On the contrary, he seems destined to make them worse. And if Mamdani can get elected, other dishonest Democrats can do it too. All it takes is a certain amount of shamelessness.

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