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how bad those statistics are being collected today in the US

Most of that data was collected outside of Trump's terms, either under Biden or Obama, and the trend is consistent.

it doesn’t account for cost of living expenses

It uses "real" dollars, which accounts for inflation. So yes, it does.

Income distribution is irrelevant here, I'm looking at median incomes rising over time, relative to inflation. Musk or Bezos making billions doesn't skew these numbers since they're not mean numbers (average).

I could probably dig up some stats that break it down by income percentile, but I'm worried you'll just reject it because it doesn't fit your worldview. If you provide some evidence to back up your claims (not just income gap, that's well known, but that people are becoming worse off), I'll go dig through the data and see what I can find. But "things are actually getting better" don't make headlines, so there's a lot of rage bait to dig through.

most of the people I know are barely getting by and have nothing for retirement

Anecdotes aren't statistics.

If you go back 50 years, people still didn't save enough for retirement. Pensions largely filled in the gap there, but a lot of people still fell through the cracks. That's largely not an income problem and more a priorities problem. Show me someone who doesn't have enough for retirement and I can show you someone with a similar income who did. Even people with huge incomes often live paycheck to paycheck.

Obviously individual circumstances differ, but individual circumstances don't define trends.

the majority of younger Americans have far less wealth than our parents or grandparents did at our age

Do you have sources to back any of this up?

Dark Money

That certainly happens, but stories like this are mostly rage bait.

Do you think companies suddenly got greedy recently? They've always been greedy, and have been screwing people over since time immemorial.

The reason things get more expensive isn't because some capitalist decided to suddenly become more greedy, it's because of supply and demand.

Things shot up in price during COVID for a number of reasons:

• less supply due to supply chain disruption
• more cash due to stimulus payments and less work expenses
• more time at home, so people invested more in things to do at home

Yet people blame "those greedy capitalists" when really it's consumer behavior largely driving up prices.

When the cause of higher prices is resolved, prices tend to return to normal. For example:

• eggs were $5+/dozen at the start of the year and hard to find due to supply shortage from a bird flu epidemic, now they're around $2.50 (both at my local Costco); that's about where they were a year ago
• houses in my area are dropping in price and staying on the market longer since construction is catching up
• used cars were frequently more expensive than new back in 2022 or so, and now both new and used are largely in line with inflation adjusted 2019 figures (e.g. base model 2026 Prius is ~$30k, vs $25k MSRP for 2019, or ~$31k after inflation)

technology inevitably creating some surplus, not trickle down from the rich

I don't know what you mean by "trickle down from the rich," but things like technological change is funded by the rich. Reagan was certainly an idiot here, my point is merely that things get better partially because of investments by the rich. That generally doesn't mean you make more money, but that you get more for your money (e.g. everyone seems to have smartphones now vs almost nobody 20 years ago).

climate change

This doesn't seem related, not sure why you bring it up. If anything, it'll create jobs since we'll need people to build dikes, rebuild coastal homes, etc, at the cost of reduced GDP since it's not actually productive work.

the last 50 years have not been kind to poorer Americans.

Afaik, no time is kind to poorer people. But I firmly believe poorer people are better off today than they were 50 years ago.