*Real Median Family Income FRED *has doubled from 1960 – 2020. *Real GDP Per Capita* has tripled since 1960. Real Median Household Income Increased just twenty-five percent since 1984, and Real Median Personal Income rose only forty percent since 1974, which is well below The Living Wage. So why, in 2022, is it impossible for a single-income earner to achieve the same standard of living our grandparents had? In most cases, it costs more to sustain oneself than jobs pay, making buying a home or having a child impossible.
It is well known that a typical worker in the U.S in 1960 could support a family of Four while the wife stayed home. There is no shortage of first-person accounts of workers earning enough to support an entire family with a 1,000 sqft house and car or two. My Aunt, born in 1950, lived near Central Park in Manhattan on a waitress's salary. Now, a one-bedroom within a century-old building in THE BRONX costs $2,000/mo, requiring an individual to make a minimum of $80,000/yr to live in one of the most violent and impoverished counties in the United Stated| Insane Rent Prices. What is causing the phenomenon everyone is experiencing, where most people cannot afford to live despite record corporate profits and the highest GDP in history? What other conclusions or questions can we ask?
Living Wage Calc | According to MIT data, most people can't start families and can't live without social safety nets or subsidies, and no one is talking about it! I don't know the right question to ask. You could argue that life expectancy has increased, but the quality of that life has diminished such that the population will age and shrink.