Memories

I remember the early 1970’s…and this (below) describes us quite well.

”…Elizabeth Warren, writing in Harvard magazine, who shows that the median family had only one wage earner in the early 1970s, who earned $41,670, in today's money. Out of this, he or she paid the family's regular, more or less fixed, expenses: taxes, mortgage payments, health insurance, car and gas payments, etc. Typically, these costs rose to 55% of monthly income. This left the family $1,630 to spend on food, clothes, entertainment and so forth.

Now, 30 years later - after the Reagan Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disappearance of the last vestiges of the gold standard, and the biggest financial boom in history - the median family has two wage earners who, between the two of them, working nearly twice as much as before, earn around $73,770. But fixed costs have risen to 75% of income, leaving only $1,509 in "discretionary" spending.”