There’s a good explanation for that. And it’s maddening. The government intentionally & dramatically underreports the true cost of living, and that fake low number is what most employers use when they set the wages they pay. So your paycheck isn’t growing nearly as fast as it needs to in order to stay ahead of inflation. Ed Butowsky created the Chapwood Index to calculate and track a more realistic measurement of the true cost of living that American’s experience “in the real world”, as an alternative to the laughably phony Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the US government’s Bureau of Labor and Statistics.