I did, but it seems you didn’t read what I wrote. To quote myself: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. The link’s thesis—the idea that “real” wages increased and therefore low-wage workers’ finances materially improved—relies on the false assumption that “real” wages are real, or equivalently that core inflation (which is the method used to calculate inflation in the united states) reflects price changes as experienced by the common person. This assumption is false, because among other things core inflation excludes food and energy, which is… uh… what? Now don’t get me wrong, there are things core inflation is good for, but measuring the lived experience of the working class is not one of them.

I'm familiar with this talking point. It's actually brilliant. So core inflation does exclude food and energy (as well as housing), mostly because their prices swing up and down in ways that would add noise to the metric. And so, there's an argument that the real level of inflation would be much higher if only they were included.

The problem is that the premise is completely accurate ("inflation" level excludes important things like energy and food), but the idea that inflation would be way different if they were included makes perfect sense, but it isn't true. The prices of things that are excluded have been rising at about the same rate (on a timescale as years go by) as the prices of things that are not excluded. Even for housing, which is a little surprising.

Look. I'm not making it up:

https://www.in2013dollars.com/Meats/price-inflation/2021-to-2025?amount=100

That's the percent inflation in meat over the time Biden was president. It's 15% cumulative. Your low-income worker who made 30% more, nominally, is able to buy 15% more meat now then they were in 2020.

You can look at the graph and see a lot more of the picture, too: There was Covid inflation for 2020 - 2022, and then it dropped right back to as if the whole thing hadn't happened. The two huge bars in 2021 and 2022 are the only reason it was even 15%. Biden didn't do that, he actually recovered well enough from the Covid apocalypse and also boosted up wages by enough that low-income people were better by quite a bit than they had been before it all happened, even though he got handed a big shit sandwich at the beginning. Without that shit sandwich, they'd be more like 30% ahead right now. And it happened specifically because of Biden's deliberate policies, I can send you a couple articles that get into the weeds of the details if you want.

Your numbers (22% nominal and 3% real) for the middle chunk of the graph sound pretty accurate to me. Biden prioritized low-income workers (in particular with short-term-inflationary policies to keep unemployment down), and so the middle part of the graph pretty much kept pace (they gained 3%) but any actual gains they could have made got swallowed up. They still have 3% more, though, and they can buy more meat now though (22% nominal gain over 15% meat inflation). That's one important reason why food prices are kept out of the overall graph -- they might swing either up or down and distort the picture.

Does that make sense? I'm very into this type of analysis. I'm saying that there is a big disconnect, now that we're talking numbers, between the numbers you are saying and the vibes that they should imply.