The claim was "are", not "were" or "typically". I don't have a sense of the actual numbers but you say yourself that "recently they started going up", which if accurate matches the claim you respond to.

And even if the claim is entirely off base, isn't it sort of the opposite of FUD? (being unrealistically rosy, rather than motivating "fear, uncertainty, and doubt")

The implicit point was that the current increases are insufficient to catch up to the value lost due to inflation over the past decade due to compounding effects.

More details:

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/wage-stagna...

As a side note, during the pandemic, I drove from NYC to SF by car and when being confronted with the non-coastal real America reality, I don’t think a one off 10% wage raise from $20/hr to $22/hr will make a lot of difference to a lot of people who are in a whole lot of serious economic need. As a simple example, the prices of wheat this year increased by more than 50% which translates directly into cost of food.

I think for the purposes of this question we're interested in the past couple years, not 2010. I don't see a way to do longer (as opposed to month-over-month) comparisons on that page, but some analysis is offered here: https://cepr.net/the-medias-war-against-biden-over-inflation...

> The average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers is up 5.8 percent over the last year. It’s up 10.3 percent if we want to go back two years.

> The increases are even larger towards the bottom end of the wage distribution. The average hourly wage for non-supervisory workers in restaurants has risen 12.4 percent over the last year and 13.5 percent over the last two years.

This is pretty substantial.

But it even goes further than this, because what policy tools does the government have on-hand to curb inflation besides raising interest rates until they induce a recession, and won't this be much more harmful to a normal family's bottom line than inflation is?

There are a lot of tools. Here are some random ideas (not exhaustive)

1. Enforce no-hoarding by businesses to release inventory into markets. Hoarding leads to price increases.

2. Expand infrastructure (in progress) to alleviate bottlenecks in the supply chain

3. Remove some of the not-so-smart tariffs instituted by the previous administration. Import tariffs are paid by, well, importer which leads to price increases.

4. Instead of continuously selling oil from reserves to foreign governments, keep some at home and release continuously to keep energy prices low. Energy cost is the single most important factor in consumer prices (because it takes energy in form of various fuels to: cool, transport, etc)

5. Break down monopolies that stifle innovation and lead to increase in value extracting behaviors by monopolists, instead of real innovation and new business formation.

6. Create new business federal subsidies of some sort?

7. Criminalize scalping (as is done in some countries)