Wages need to rise to keep up with inflation, especially since the value of the dollar has been trashed:
[3]
But Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project document [4] (hat tip Ezra Klein [5]) that real median earnings for men declined between 1969 and 2009:
[6]
And wages have only kept dropping [7] since 2009.
In addition – when those who have only part-time work are taken into account – we have depression-level unemployment [8].
As Klein notes:
When you take all men, not just those working fulltime, into account, the slight decline in the above graph becomes a plummet of 28 percent in median real wages from 1969 to 2009.
[9]
The bottom line is that – due to idiotic government policy [10] – most of the jobs being created are part-time and low wage [11] jobs.