A 55 year old losing their 100k job and facing only minimum wage offers that replaces 30% of their income is a sad reality for a lot of Americans right now. There is not a worker shortage in every area of the economy just in the economy as a whole.
Wages for the bottom 25th percentile of Americans are significantly up in the last 2 years, even counting inflation. I promise the economy is actually doing well.
(For instance, if everyone was losing wages there wouldn't be inflation.)
Yes, real wages decreased on average for everyone, but the bottom quartile increased so much from 2019 that they're still ahead. Of course, it always depends which point you start measuring from.
Gas prices (which drives a lot of how people feel everything is doing) have also been up and down but are solidly down recently.
