Today, the president is paid $400,000. How do they compare with adjustments for inflation?
I tried a couple of online inflation calculators. One said $488,000± while another said $780,000±.
Depends how you inflate it, and the CPI may not be the right way. Try this link, courtesy of Jonathan Woodall from this thread.
Hmmm… I’m not sure what to make of that. I checked them all (using 1865 as a date), and got amounts between $280,000 and $30,000,000. As an economist, what would you use?
There’s a staff/guest report on this coming up - although this may be a taboo thing to say, since the last time I said it I got gazumped by Cecil.
When you ask “what’s that in 1995 dollars?” the answer’s clear. But for longer periods the size and structure of economy has changed so much that there is no right answer - subtly different forms of the question give very different answers (as you saw).
If you wanted to know “As kind of the steward of the US economy, has the proportion of output earned by the US president gone up or down?”, I’d use the relative share of GDP for 1865 (and yes, I did need the date). That’s your $30b.
But if I wanted to know whether the US president was better or worse paid relative to top executives/ academics/ patricians today, I’d come up with a different (and rather lower) number (not available at that site).
These would both be fine questions (and probably better than “how many bundles of the average consumer products could you buy with a president’s salary these days?”), but you just have live with the idea that the best guesses as to the answers to them are very different.
I think what I’m really wondering about might be called “buying power”. Does that help?
What was the price of gold at the time? I’ve read that the value of gold is reasonably constant, an ounce will buy you a decent suit.
The price of gold was about $20/ounce in 1865. Since 1984 or so, it has probably averaged about $360. That’s about a 19-fold increase.
So, 25K would be about $450K today.
Or, an 18-fold increase :o
whatever