1 Hour Of Work At Minimum Wage Today Versus 1 Hour Back In The Day (expenses, debt)
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Big Mac was introduced 1967 - was $0.45 - 3x that price. Cheeseburger was also $0.20 (worth about $1.65 today) vs $1 cost currently. Basic burger is not a big mac.
So if you have the impression that you are not as well off as you used to be, you are right. Forgetting about the fact that real wages have essentially declined, corporate profits have skyrocketed due the improvement in productivity. In other words, the labor cost/dollar of profit has decreased substantially - primarily due to automation.
The end result of all of this is obvious - a good chunk of the American middle class is becoming an underclass, and the divide between the very wealthy and that underclass is getting bigger every day.
Don't have any easy solutions, but this is the reality.
That's an interesting, uh, alternate reality.
Wages are only one part of total compensation. Total compensation has been going up, of course, but regulatory requirements force a higher percentage of it into non-monetary compensation.
Pre-pandemic, we had the best economy in anyone's memory. We had record low unemployment. The number of people in the lower-class was shrinking, as they moved upward. People in the middle-class were thriving as well, moving upward. We had the strongest labor market that anyone can remember with ~ 14 million open jobs; it was hand-to-hand combat among employers to hire anyone with a pulse. If you didn't like your job, you just drove at random to another employer and you could be hired on the spot. Students graduating from college saw nothing but opportunity, as they received multiple job offers pretty much without even trying.
The economy was wonderful.
The tired trope of "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" was only half right:
Big Mac was introduced 1967 - was $0.45 - 3x that price. Cheeseburger was also $0.20 (worth about $1.65 today) vs $1 cost currently. Basic burger is not a big mac.
Wages are only one part of total compensation. Total compensation has been going up, of course, but regulatory requirements force a higher percentage of it into non-monetary compensation.
Pre-pandemic, we had the best economy in anyone's memory. We had record low unemployment. The number of people in the lower-class was shrinking, as they moved upward. People in the middle-class were thriving as well, moving upward. We had the strongest labor market that anyone can remember with ~ 14 million open jobs; it was hand-to-hand combat among employers to hire anyone with a pulse. If you didn't like your job, you just drove at random to another employer and you could be hired on the spot. Students graduating from college saw nothing but opportunity, as they received multiple job offers pretty much without even trying.
The economy was wonderful.
The tired trope of "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" was only half right:
Couldn't extract the link for this data - could you please post it?
Not sure when or where your grandparents bought, how their income ranked vs. median income etc. but the national average house cost 4.32 times median income in 1953 and a shade over 4 times median income now.
Washington State, west side. We have a severe housing problem here. This year, average household income just broke $50K/year. Average listed home price up 16.7% to $661,000. It's a worse income/home cost ratio than San Francisco.
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