I only make outrageous claims. After some research and number crunching, if you compare a professional salary from 1913 to one today, you start at $5000/yr and when adjusted for CPI, you get $155,000/yr today. That's not bad; you can live pretty well on 155k a year. But when you look at that not in terms of consumer price inflation but rather the slice of the total monetary supply that income represents, you see that the size of that slice has actually shrunk so drastically, that the fed has printed so much money, that you would have to be making $6.6 million dollars a year today to be earning the same proportion of the money supply as a professional in 1913. The 155k salary earns you a standard of living that looks nice, but is made up of poor quality and cheap goods that make up for the fact that your money has gotten so worthless. The $6.6M salary is what you would need to buy the same quality goods you could obtain by default before the world's wealth was stolen for over a century.