> I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment.
It is not OBVIOUSLY false.
Look at education costs relative to the cost of living. Consider that your only recourse to a decent salary is through higher education, since the middle class union job is dead (and REALLY dead for someone young since all the ones that do exist are held by older people that sold out the younger generation in successive union negotiations).
You really think housing is cheaper or better now? I'm assuming you live in silicon valley. The only thing built is "bigger and better" because that is MORE EXPENSIVE and people have to PAY MORE for it. Nobody builds 'affordable housing' which you are obliquely criticizing people for not choosing. There is no choice for 'affordable housing': all of it that exists is occupied. That's why there is a housing shortage and rental shortage in practically every major urban market.
And then there is health care...
Food has dropped in quality even if one argues it has maintained cost parity.
Jobs are far worse that they used to be. Like food, the number of jobs is cooked to seem the same, but the quality of the job is far worse, which leads me to...
A great deal of consumer cost advantages have been due to globalization/arbitrage of foreign near-slave-labor. The cost of better consumer goods is destruction of the middle class and US manufacturing.
All the major milestones of the happy capitalist worker's lifetime are all very very very much more expensive or worse.
All of these structural degradations to the US are being propped over with financing shenanigans such as low interest rates. The Pandemic is all that on steroids.
All those shenanigans are sensitive to disruption. COVID is pushing our currency manipulation/control to the brink.