Many, if not most states have higher minimum wage laws, with $15/hour being pretty common, about 10x the 1970 level. I don't think the price change in gold is a good indicator of the change in the cost of living. For example, a new 1970 Chevy Impala was $3000-3500, and now they cost 10x as much. However, the median price of a house has gone up 20x since 1970.It makes me angry when greedy boomers who fucked the world try to gaslight younger generations about how "young people don't want to work anymore" when we get a fraction of the wages they got when measured in real terms.
In 1971 (when America went off the partial gold standard) federal minimum wage in the USA was $1.60 per hour. At that time an ounce of gold was roughly $44.60 USD (closing price for 1971). So a full time minimum wage job (38 hour work week) earned you 1.36 ounces of gold in a week. Today federal minimum wage in the USA is $7.25 per hour. 1 week of full time work (38 hours) in a minimum wage job in America today would earn you just 0.081 ounces of gold. So when you measure wages properly according to real inflation (the gold price) young people today on minimum wage are literally getting paid 94% less then boomers who entered the work force and worked a minimum wage job. And these psychopath boomers have the audacity to complain that young people have a bad attitude at work. These greedy boomers are lucky that young people today even show up at work for the slave level wages they are receiving. Minimum wage (based on how much gold it would buy you) would literally have to be $121 USD per hour today to be equivalent to what boomers were receiving when they entered the workforce. Boomers should just be grateful there has not been a violent revolution against them by the younger generations.
The overall increase in the cost of living is somewhere between that for a car and for a house, so maybe 12-18x. That's more than the increase in minimum wage, but using gold for the comparison gives an unrealistic picture of the difference in buying power.