The US dollar will always be worth one dollar. The price of things may go up according to manufacturing costs and their scarcity, but the dollar can't inflate across the board by simply making more of them.

Wages are just one metric of our economy and rise and fall as labor gains or loses influence in the economy. It would be nice if it could all be quantified to fit neatly into "inflation", but that isn't how a modern economy works.

I bought a computer for my business in '80 that cost $15,000 and it wouldn't hold a candle to one I recently purchased for $500, so inflation doesn't seem to be an issue in all pricing. I also purchased a new car that year and paid around $5,000 for it. That car would now cost me $25,000 to buy new, but it wouldn't be comparable to the one from '80 in most measures of value and features that weren't even available then.

In that time period we moved from being the largest exporting nation to the largest importer of goods, so the gold supplies would have dwindled rapidly in trade to put us in serious deficit. Gold wasn't the answer, but gold bugs look fondly back at our heyday and imagine that our gold would never run out or that other countries wouldn't demand it from us in exchange for their goods.

The end of the economy that resulted from FDR's New Deal policies is the standard by which our economics is almost always compared, but we were the only nation with any real productive capacity after WWII and we ended the convertibility of dollars to gold in '34 domestically. We can regain those wonder years by simply recreating the conditions in taxation and spending from that era, but going back to basing our currency supply on a shiny metal we have to dig from the ground and don't have much left would not be wise.