Wages are simply a way to put a relative value on someone's time in order to determine what share of what the economy produces they get to have. If wages were half of what they are now and prices were a quarter of what they are now people would be "ahead" financially. How much you get to have determines an individual's standard of living, how much a nation produces determines a nation's standard of living.

First, wage changes absent growth in GDP is simply reallocating goods and services where everyone collectively gets less than they had before (assuming the population is increasing). Since you are dividing the same amount of goods and services among more people. You might be happy with the new allocation, but someone else isn't... typically the "someone else" is someone without economic or political power.

So the issue becomes how do we raise standards of living for all Americans?

First and foremost, the starting point is increasing the productivity of Americans. A lot of things go into that goal... cheaper energy and natural resources, better education and skills training, more capital equipment. But at the end of the day, it translates into producing more "value" using less labor. The less labor things require to be produced, the more labor is left over to produce other stuff.

At the end of the day, if your government's policies do not encourage the production of more stuff per person, then you are getting poorer either quickly or more slowly... unless you taking stuff from other people, which usually causes them to get upset whether they are rich or poor.

The next question becomes how do we insure more of the "more stuff" we produce goes to people that have "less stuff"? This is a thorny issue.

Socialism tries to do that, but generally results in people in people working less making less stuff and so overtime, people are poorer, no matter how attractive it might appear at first.

Creating labor shortages by restricting immigration and imports (outsourcing of labor to other countries) does create labor shortages and that forces "owners" to share more of the "profit" with those that people that supply "labor" or else those people leave to find a "better paying" job. This strategy has the advantage of forcing owners to be more efficient (productive) with labor since it costs more... and workers get more stuff because they earn more.

Another way is to make people's skills more "valuable". So absent any restrictions on immigration and imports, if people develop skills that are in short supply globally, owners will have to pay them more to attract them and as the economy adds more people with valuable skills the value of the things they produce will create more stuff.

Sadly, our politicians seem more focused on class warfare and using government to allocate stuff rather than encouraging the production of more stuff. As long as that continues, people will get poorer regardless of how much or little inflation one has. The advantage of inflation is it becomes obvious that absent enough stuff standards of living decline especially among those without economic or political power. This leads to discontent more quickly and perhaps accelerates a change in leadership to get leaders who will focus on producing more stuff.