Your raise was not a raise.

You got 3% more dollars and the dollars lost more than that, so you did more work for less buying power and called it a promotion. This is the quiet tax nobody votes on. It never shows up on a pay stub. It shows up at the grocery store, the gas pump, the rent renewal.

Inflation is not prices going up. It is your money going down. The Austrians named this a century ago: print more units, each unit buys less, and the people furthest from the printer pay first.

Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million. No board can vote to make more of yours worth less.

You can't out-earn a currency designed to leak. You can only opt out of it.