So said Nixon 54 years ago today, when the US defaulted on The Bretton Woods system:
Doesn’t look too stable to me
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It’s because the US government prints money faster than the supply of gold expands. Would be more interesting to compare the total value of all the US currency in circulation to the total value of all the gold produced.
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Which is why the economy has a hard time expanding if the supply of gold doesn’t keep up. The “amount of money” has a direct impact on how much capital can be formed and how new businesses can get started.
So it’s worth thinking “am I prepared to accept the diminution of paper money in exchange for an expanding economy?” I think most people would say “yes.”
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I think most people will say “yes” as long as there are enough jobs for those who want to work, prices are stable and wages do not shrink in real purchasing power.
Clearly, the money supply must grow as the population grows to provide purchasing power as production grows. The gold supply is constrained and can’t grow as fast as the economy. Having a gold standard for the country would constrain the potential economic growth.
On the other hand, an unconstrained fiat currency which can be inflated both monetarily (by the Federal Reserve and fractional-reserve banking) and fiscally (by a Congress that runs ever-increasing deficits) can cause inflation in both consumer goods/ services and assets.
There is a middle ground that provides stability. That requires the old-fashioned virtues of temperance and discipline so it can potentially get out of hand.
The Federal Reserve tracks this as real (inflation-adjusted) Disposable Personal Income: Per Capita. To see growth rates, click on the “Edit Graph” button in the upper right-hand corner.
This has been growing consistently for decades. The wild spike due to the Congressional helicopter money drop into households is what caused the recent consumer price inflation.
Wendy
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It is the ‘prices are stable’ part which isn’t compatible with the ‘diminution of paper money’.
DB2
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Just doing a little web searching I found that the average annual US wage in 1900 was about $450. A little more searching gave me $62,000 as the average annual US wage in 2024. If I haven’t moved the decimal point incorrectly, that’s almost a 13,800% increase. If that’s right, the lesson I see is that money is for spending or investing, not hoarding.
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Saving money in a low-yield environment is one step forward, two steps back.
But it’s still necessary to hold cash for living expenses and emergencies. Money that is invested in the stock market can fluctuate widely as the market can drop for long periods of time.
Wendy
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And gold only went up 7800%. This is NOT the strong argument for the gold standard that some think it is. 
What some people miss with this whole “the dollar has lost 96% of its value!!!” is that people today are getting far more dollars than they used to. Its offsetting. What is important is, is the standard of living going up? If wage growth outstrips dollar devaluation then all is good.
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We keep a couple years worth of our spending above our SS and my pension in cash in a savings account to avoid having to sell into a down market. It’s worked well for the first 14 years of retirement.
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Back at the turn of the century you could buy a everyday dinner for 25 cents. Dinner at a nice hotel restaurant cost $1.25. A classic dinner at Denny’s currently is about $11, so the price has gone up
11/0.25 = 44x
DB2
I don’t think you could get a dinner at a nice hotel for $12.50 much less $1.25 in 1999!
JimA
I input 450$ in 1900 $ into an inflation adjustment calculator and got “equals 17,306 today”.
2024 average wage was 62k, then as @bjurasz says, we getting more $ for our time.
With those additional $, I get WAY more ‘creature comforts’ today than I got in 1960s. let alone what my grandparents got in 1900.
WRT to ‘Nixon said he’d stabilize the dollar’… I sorta think he had a different definition of what ‘stabilize’ meant in that context. I think the plan was ‘Global Currency’ as in all other currencies would fluctuate around whatever ‘value’ the USD has.
ie, the dollar is the Stable basis for the world economy. (Petro Dollar, and all that.
them 
ralph
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Here is the report card. You can not do these things without coming off the gold standard.