Hourly Salaries Shrink in U.S.

Is unemployment shrinking or is it your paycheck? Turns out, for the past five years, the amount of money Americans earn per hour has dropped after taking inflation into account. While hourly wages have risen 10 percent since the Great Recession ended in 2009, there has been a .3 percent slip when adjusted for inflation. Recovery has been slow: historically, the U.S. economy has grown 3.3 percent annually, but in the past four years there has only been an average of 2 percent growth.