If I had a gold-based salary (rather than U.S. Dollar-based), I’d be doing quite well now.

I just ran the numbers, and sheesh! When I started working full-time as a web designer, my beginning salary was $25k/yr. At the time, gold was trading at $280US/oz., so if I’d been paid in gold, I would have been working for 89.29oz/yr.

Fast-forward to November 2007: the U.S. Dollar has become so devalued (primarily due to the never-ending Federal Reserve printing presses—we’ve got to fund the troops somehow, and that somehow is by printing more FR notes) that if we take that hypothetical “gold-standard salary” and convert it into today’s U.S. Dollar, you end up with $71,500/yr.

Let me say that again: $25,000 in May 2000 equals $71,500 in November 2007.

Somehow those raises don’t seem so much like raises anymore.