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A New Record!

I wish I could be excited, but I'm not seeing the benefits personally and I don't care about everyone else. ;)

Other than milk, which hasn't gone up a lot in the past 40 years, all of the standard pricing items have gone up by huge percentages. For example, tuition when I first went to college in 1978 at Weber State and then at Utah State was $850 for a year. Now it is $6342 for a year. My first apartment in Salt Lake City in 1984 rented for $270. That same apartment now rents for $1099. Average price of a car in 1975 was just over $3,000. Now it is over $30,000. The house I grew up in recently sold for over $200,000, but when we bought it in 1969 it cost $28,000.

Wages for anyone but the wealthy have certainly not kept up.

Depressingly, I make less now than I did 20 years ago. But that is more a product of my declining health than anything else.
 
LogGrad98 said:
Yep. Like the housing crisis in California right now. The market is strong, so strong it is driving up not just the price to purchase a home (up about 30% on average in the last 2 years), but rental rates are skyrocketing. One house we considered renting 2 years ago when we moved here, at that time renting for $1950 per month, is on the market again, this time listed at $2300 per month. And landlords have been raising rents as leases come due to take advantage of it. It is ugly right now.
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It is happening in Salt Lake too. I read recently that Utah has 250k more households than homes(including apts, condos,etc). That's a huge number considering we only have around 1 million homes.

As I see it there are 3 major components to this problem

Pent up demand from the recession
Restrictive zoning ordinances
Shortage of labor

There isn't much we can do about the first. We can relax zoning ordinances for residential buildings and we could encourage imigration to meet our manual labor demands.

We probably won't do either so... it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
 
JazzGal said:
Other than milk, which hasn't gone up a lot in the past 40 years, all of the standard pricing items have gone up by huge percentages.
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You couldn't make a more inaccurate statement. The opposite is true by just about every single measure (education excepted, and there is nothing we can do about limited resources although many prices there continue to decline as well).

USA spends the least % of disposable income on food than ever before. The trend has been down forever and will probably continue to do so until we hit the basement cost.
 
fishonjazz said:
Im doing it currently. Yet im working more than just about anyome to the point that my overtime is kinda like a second income i guess. Yet im still always broke and always living paycheck to paycheck. And im actually quite frugal and good with money. It sucks. Im scared of retirement and will probably work right up until the day i die. I would like to have a second child so my daughter could have a sibling but i cant afford another child.
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Hey, just don't get divorced. The ex will be taking nice vacations while you sit by and take it up the ***. You get penalized for living frugally, trying to retire debt and not having a lot of other expenses. I expect to die at my desk. Or at least hope that's the case. Of course, if you ain't got nothing, no one will get much when they sue you for medical bills at the end of your life.
 
Wes Mantooth said:
According to some cost of living calculator I found online, it appears the cost of living has risen 2,500% since 1975. I’m not even sure that can be accurate.

Another site which calculates data has inflation having risen almost 500%. That seems right to me.

Based on that, have salaries increased accordingly?
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Salaries match inflation. That's pretty much a guarantee of the math. The questions come around quintiles and so forth. Also, our inflation measurement does a very terrible job of calculating and capturing any remotely close picture of standard of living delta. Basically what I mean by that is wages are measured as stagnant in real terms yet standard of living has skyrocketed. Look at the math behind the stagnant wages myth and you'll see that it's impossible for wages not to stagnate in the context of our current measurement of inflation, yet living standards dont. And if you want to break that out into class warfare, well, take the entire income rise of the rich and divvy it up among the rest. Now we all get a few hundred bucks a year more. That's stagnant all the same, especially after adding in the inflation it would produce.
 
Wes Mantooth said:
According to some cost of living calculator I found online, it appears the cost of living has risen 2,500% since 1975. I’m not even sure that can be accurate.

Another site which calculates data has inflation having risen almost 500%. That seems right to me.

Based on that, have salaries increased accordingly?
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Long run average was roughly 4%/yr last I calculated it about 10 years ago. It should be slightly lower now since inflation has trended down since the Reagan reset, but I still use 50% every 10 years as an easy rule of thumb.
 
idestroyedthetoilet said:
Based on what? Try living like people did in the '60's. Dual income life is badass. DINKs, even better (yes, that's where the term dink came from). But single income never was easy, on average anyway.
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Agree to disagree



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