Nominal incomes will have to go up sooner or later; you can’t dissociate incomes from commodity prices or consumer prices.
Average nominal incomes can’t go up unless either the money supply goes up (printing) or the rate at which people trade (velocity of money) goes up. Money you’re paid with has to come from somewhere. If the amount of money in the economy is constant, some consumer prices may go up, but others will have to come down to compensate.
And why would nominal incomes go up in todays environment? It only makes sense to raise someone’s wages if there is competition for his labor/skills. In some skilled fields like programming, you might have competition because outsourcing and offshoring become more expensive. (On the other hand, global demand for programmers might fall!) In a wider picture, we have rising unemployment in the country, and dollar must fall a lot further before it starts to make sense to hire unskilled and poorly educated American Joe Sixpacks instead of unskilled and uneducated Indonesians to make shoes and toys.
