The Middle Class Sure Isn’t What It Used to Be

This report was originally published by Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper

If you’ve noticed that it takes a lot more money to live the middle-class American Dream than it used to, you aren’t alone. Buying a house, saving for retirement, and putting your kids through college while living comfortably is a whole lot harder than it once was. Being part of the middle class sure isn’t what it used to be.

Despite the rosy outlook on employment numbers, things have become incredibly difficult for many families. They’re deeply in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, and without an emergency fund. Let’s take a look at what the media is saying about the middle class.

First of all, what IS “middle class”?

There are many different definitions of middle class, and a lot of it depends on where you live. “Easy,” you may be thinking. “Just live somewhere with a lower cost of living.” Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy, because when you move to an area with a lower cost of living, you’re likely to get paid less for your occupation.

Once upon a time, the middle class was the largest group of Americans. Now, according to the Pew Research Group, it is closely matched by people in the low-income class and the high-income class. The image below shows the stats for 2014.

Photo Credit: Pew Research Group

According to Quentin Fottrell, the personal finance editor for MarketWatch, “middle class” is tough to define:

There is no universal definition of the middle class. The Pew Research Center often uses the middle wealth quintile, the middle 20% of Americans’ income and wealth. Other economists have said it’s defined as making 50% above or below the median annual income. Most Americans regard a college education as a critical component to becoming middle class. Some 71% of people with a college degree consider themselves middle class versus just 58% of people with a high school diploma or less, according to a 2012 survey by Gallup. And yet college graduates in 2017 are shouldering $1.3 trillion in student debt.

Previous studies suggest those who identify as middle class as higher than 50%, but also indicates that the middle class is shrinking. Those who identify as middle class has fallen to 59% in 2010 from 62% in 1991, according to a separate report by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.  (source)

Other sources cite variables like savings, net worth, debt, and spending to determine whether a family is “middle class.”

These two calculators will help you compare your income to others in your area:

• The Pew Research Group Income Calculator


• The CNN Money Middle-Class Calculator

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to go with Pew’s definition of the middle wealth quintile.

The middle class is shrinking

The middle class is getting smaller. According to an article on Quartz:

Pew defines middle earners as anyone who earns between two-thirds and twice the median household income in a given year. In 2014, this included a three-person household earning between $42,000 to $126,000 per year. In 1971, 61% of households were middle earners by this standard. By 2015, only 50% were. (source)

The Pew Group said:

After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data. (source)

Both of the above articles state that more people are getting pushed into the higher income class than are sliding into the lower income class, which sounds great, initially. But when you look at it more closely, those in the middle class are far less wealthy than they used to be:

…middle-income Americans have fallen further behind financially in the new century. In 2014, the median income of these households was 4% less than in 2000. Moreover, because of the housing market crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-09, their median wealth (assets minus debts) fell by 28% from 2001 to 2013…

…The gaps in income and wealth between middle- and upper-income households widened substantially in the past three to four decades. As noted, one result is that the share of U.S. aggregate household income held by upper-income households climbed sharply, from 29% in 1970 to 49% in 2014. More recently, upper-income families, which had three times as much wealth as middle-income families in 1983, more than doubled the wealth gap; by 2013, they had seven times as much wealth as middle-income families. (source)

It’s getting harder and harder to thrive on a middle-class income

The middle class isn’t what it used to be. Once the “American Dream,”middle-class families are struggling for several reasons. Despite their incomes, they owe more and have saved less than ever before. If you can dig through the politically charged introduction and get to the statistics in this NY Mag article, you’ll find the following:

The percentage of families with more debt than savings is higher now than at any point since 1962, while the median American family’s net worth is lower than it’s been in nearly a quarter-century…

…So, this is what a “good” economy now looks like in the United States: shrinking household wealth; soaring middle-class debt; wage growth that can’t keep pace with the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and higher education; job growth concentrated in part-time positions; widespread retirement insecurity; and more wealth-less households than America has seen for 56 years. (source)

Having more debt than savings is called “negative wealth.” One-fifth of American households fall into this category. Of course, $1 trillion in credit-card debt and $1.4 trillion in student loan debt has to take a toll eventually, right?

Then there’s the ridiculous cost of healthcare in our country. (I recently had my own bad experience with healthcare costs.) Those who are on the upper end of the middle class are hit with premiums well into the thousands of dollars per month for far less coverage than they had previously.

“Health-care spending is growing at an unsustainable rate. Insurance and medical costs are draining the incomes of the middle class—tens of millions of people who earn too much to qualify for government-subsidized coverage, but not so much that they don’t feel the bite of medical bills…Health premiums and out-of-pocket costs wiped out most of the real income gains for a median family from 1999 to 2011, according to an analysis published on the blog of the journal Health Affairs in 2013.” (source)

Finally, Americans don’t have much in the way of an emergency fund. A recent study found that a whopping 47% of us would be unable to cover an unexpected bill of only $400. The middle class – and often even the upper middle class – are living paycheck to paycheck, and not always through poor handling of money.

Where the great jobs are, folks want to make $300,000-400,000 to live a middle-class lifestyle.

Lots of young people go deeply into debt for an education that will (hopefully) land them a job in Silicon Valley, New York City, or some other metropolitan area. After all, that’s where the jobs that start you off at $80,000 a year are, right?

Unfortunately, these are also the places in which the cost of living is completely out of reach for those with middle-class incomes, making it so that to be “middle class,” people feel as though they need to earn anywhere from $300,000-400,000 per year. This article pinpoints the actual amount of money you’d need to make in 25 different metropolitan areas to live a middle-class lifestyle.

While there’s a big difference between these amounts and the amounts that statistics show are needed, the stats aren’t showing everything. Sam Dogen wrote an article about why you need to earn more:

Let me tell you a sad story: In order to comfortably raise a family in an expensive coastal city like San Francisco or New York, you’ve got to make at least $300,000 a year. You can certainly raise a family earning less as many do, but it won’t be easy if your goal is to save for retirement, save for your child’s education, own your own home instead of rent and actually retire by a reasonable age. (source)

Here’s the budget he put together. If you read the article and look at his review of the expenses, they aren’t as out of whack as they might sound to those of us who live outside of the major metro areas.

While I can’t actually imagine making that kind of money every year, neither can I imagine facing those kinds of expenses. When your base costs are that high, even hardcore frugality can’t save you.

What’s a middle-class family to do?

It’s essential to watch the trends and be ready if things come tumbling down. Here are the things on which you should focus:

• Building an emergency fund – you don’t want to be one of those people who can’t handle a $400 emergency, right?


• Reducing your fixed expenses – this will help you through the rough times


• Building a stockpile – this will cut your costs to the bare minimum during bad times


• Paying off debt – this will help you live within your means

It’s essential to pay attention to what is going on in the economy. Jose, our writer from Venezuela, wrote of numerous warning signs that should have told him that a financial crisis was drawing near. If you want to keep up to date with what is happening, subscribe to my newsletter here.

Finally, maybe it’s time to take a look at the lifestyle for which you yearn. Maybe you need to focus on simplicity. Maybe you don’t need to keep up with the Joneses. Maybe, after some adjustment, you’ll find that you are happier without the stress of competing for that middle-class lifestyle.

Figure out your priorities. Would you rather have a big house or travel the world? Would you prefer to put your kids through school debt-free or have a new car every other year? Most of us can’t do both.

The only way to be different from those families who are struggling to pay their $24,650 in monthly expenses is to live differently than they do. Being part of the middle class isn’t what it used to be. It doesn’t take a financial expert to see that the US economy, despite the optimism from the White House, is going to continue to hit most of us hard. Now is the time to make the changes before they’re forced on you.

Cost Of Housing Has Soared So High Americans Are Sliding Into Poverty

Housing prices in the United States continue to rise at unprecedented rates, forcing many into poverty. This worsening epidemic is explained well in a video by The Money GPS and it’s been engineered this way.

As nations increase taxes and regulations, the price of complying also goes up. Many of these hikes are passed onto to those who are already living paycheck to paycheck forcing them to live in poverty. “You came here for the truth, so let me unveil that for you,” says Money GPS.

 

Severe damage to the nation’s economy can occur when people don’t have disposable income. “People are spending a larger and larger share of their income on their housing. This is something they can’t avoid. It’s not as if they are buying a home and can be renting instead, we are talking about people who rent their homes. It’s very serious,” The Money GPS says.

“There’s definitely an issue with the amount that people spend on shelter, electricity, food, and other basic essentials…we have a big problem on our hands. It’s not being addressed and the bubble just keeps getting larger…they keep saying there’s a limited supply [of housing options].”

“The median asking rent for vacant rental units is consistently rising. when you rent prices continuously increasing specifically for vacant rental units.” All this is happening as the rate of homeownership declines as well. So perhaps there is some correlation between market saturation and prices, but we fail to account for the fact that property taxes put a heavy burden on homeownership and those taxes are passed on to renters in the form of higher rents.”

But the YouTube channel Bull Boom Bear Bust says this is all just a part of the global elitist’s plans to force more people into rentals and out of homeownership. According to the description of their video about this issue, it is becoming more and more clear that the central banking fiat currency system was designed to extract wealth from the poor and middle class and further enrich bankers that are creating a nation [sic] of debt servants.

“It’s a global plan,” says the narrator of the video. “These disasters and downturns in the economy are opportunities for the big money and big investors to come in and actually buy these homes.” He then discusses the reasons banks have for not foreclosing on properties right away, and it’s as simple as a wealth transfer from the middle and lower classes to the billionaires and investors:

“A reason why in some cases the banks don’t foreclose on the property right away, not only to keep the home off the market, but it also keeps the financial responsibility of the property onto the previous homeowner. So things like back due property taxes and fines for failure to keep the property up, banks don’t want to take on that responsibility, so technically in many cases, they’ll not take immediate foreclosure proceedings and in some cases, years and then the unpaid debt can come back and destroy the previous homeowner’s credit, and not hurt the bank.”

“This whole system…of the middle class being wiped out and the poor getting poorer, the increase in homelessness, the increase in people going into more and more debt, the shift from home ownership to home occupied to financial companies and institutions and investors owning these homes. This whole system has been engineered from the top down.”

He continues to explain that it all goes back to the Federal Reserve and was designed to break the average family while benefiting those already at the top. We often refer to these people as elitists. They are the politicians who are bought and paid for by corporations who push laws and regulations on the middle class that they themselves are exempt from and can profit immensely by doing. The entire system has been rigged to transfer wealth to the elites in the government and the deep state who pulls the strings.

“Homeless Explosion”: Tech Boom, Surging Rents Creating Homeless Crisis On America’s West Coast

This report was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge

America’s liberal left coast states count themselves among the most adamant supporters of controversial pieces of legislation intended to support low-income families. From their stunningly high income tax rates to their $15 minimum wage mandates, states like California and Washington are leading the charge on implementing Bernie’s socialist agenda.

Of course, some of the biggest advocates of that socialist agenda are the billionaire leaders of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies…which is precisely why it’s so ironic that it’s the “tech boom” being enjoyed by those billionaires that has resulted in surging housing prices and what SFGate described earlier today as a “homeless explosion pushing West Coast cities to the brink.”

Housing prices are soaring here thanks to the tech industry, but the boom comes with a consequence: A surge in homelessness marked by 400 unauthorized tent camps in parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. The liberal city is trying to figure out what to do.

“I’ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien. “There’s nowhere for these folks to move to.”

That struggle is not Seattle’s alone. A homeless crisis is rocking the entire West Coast, pushing abject poverty into the open like never before.

Nationally, homelessness has been trending down, partly because governments and nonprofit groups have gotten better at moving people into housing. That’s true in many West Coast cities, too, but the flow the other direction is even faster.

“So everybody who was just hanging on because they had cheap rent, they’re losing that … and they wind up outside,” said Margaret King, director of housing programs for the nonprofit DESC in Seattle. “It’s just exploded.”

According to stats gathered by the Associated Press, some 168,000 people in California, Oregon and Washington count themselves among the growing tally of homeless folks who can’t afford housing.

—Official counts taken earlier this year in California, Oregon and Washington show 168,000 homeless people in the three states, according to an AP tally of every jurisdiction in those states that reports homeless numbers to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That is 19,000 more than were counted in 2015, although the numbers may not be directly comparable because of factors ranging from the weather to new counting methods.

—During the same period, the number of unsheltered people in the three states climbed 18 percent to 105,000.

—Rising rents are the main culprit. The median one-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area is more expensive than it is in the New York City metro area, for instance.

—Since 2015, at least 10 cities or municipal regions in California, Oregon and Washington have declared emergencies due to the rise of homelessness, a designation usually reserved for natural disasters.

Of course, when home prices double in a matter of just a few years and are seemingly just as volatile as a tech stock circa March 2000, you know there’s a problem.

Meanwhile, as we pointed out a few weeks ago (see: San Diego’s Deadly Hepatitis A Outbreak Turns “Statewide Epidemic” As “Outbreak Could Last Years”), the homeless crisis in California has resulted in an alarming hepatitis A outbreak that started in San Diego and is now on the verge of reaching statewide epidemic status as cases have spread through homeless tent cities all the way north to Sacramento.

California’s outbreak of hepatitis A, already the nation’s second largest in the last 20 years, could continue for many months, even years, health officials said Thursday.

At least 569 people have been infected and 17 have died of the virus since November in San Diego, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles counties, where local outbreaks have been declared.

Dr. Monique Foster, a medical epidemiologist with the Division of Viral Hepatitis at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Thursday that California’s outbreak could linger even with the right prevention efforts.

“It’s not unusual for them to last quite some time — usually over a year, one to two years,” Foster said.

Of course, as SFGate points out, local governments on the West Coast are responding to the crisis in the best way they know how, namely by raising taxes…

All along the West Coast, local governments are scrambling for answers — and taxpayers are footing the bill.

Voters have approved more than $8 billion in spending since 2015 on affordable housing and other anti-homelessness programs, mostly as tax increases. Los Angeles voters, for example, approved $1.2 billion to build 10,000 units of affordable housing to address a homeless population that’s reached 34,000 people within city limits.

…which should only serve to accelerate the number of businesses relocating to Texas.

Renters Struggle As California Home Prices Climb Faster Than Official Inflation Rate

By Jeff Paul

The US government likes to pretend that the rising cost of living is under control. People in Southern California know better. According to a new report in the Los Angeles Times, median house prices in Southern California have nearly doubled in the last five years.

LA Times reports:

In many corners of Southern California, home prices have hit record highs. And they keep going up.

In Los Angeles County, the median price in June jumped 7.4% from a year earlier to $569,000, surpassing the previous record set in May. In Orange County, the median was up 6.1% from 2016 and tied a record reached the previous month at $695,000.

Across the six-county region, the median price — the point where half the homes sold for more and half for less — rose 7.5% from a year earlier and is now just 1% off of its all-time high of $505,000 reached in 2007, according to a report out Tuesday from CoreLogic.

The price increase was even greater than the 7.1% rise recorded in May, and some agents say there are no signs of a slowdown in the Southern California market.

One of Twitter’s funniest economic sleuths, Rudy Havenstein, points out the obvious problem:

In case you’re confused, Rudy is referencing that the US government and its central banking partners desire a 2% inflation rate. Government measures the prices consumers pay for a basket of goods and services to determine the official inflation rate called the Consumer Price Index (CPI). However, the “core” CPI doesn’t include vital things like food and energy.

The chart below from the Bureau of Labor Statistics illustrates how much more dramatic the cost of living rate moves when food and energy are added:

Market optimists tend to quote the core CPI number because it’s less dramatic, but it’s not as accurate as the “headline” CPI with food and energy included. But the core CPI claims to be a good measure of housing costs. Until 1983, the measure of homeowner cost was based largely on house prices. Today, they use some voodoo math since a home is considered an investment and a living expense. Simply put, it attempts to account for owner-occupied homes which may be going up in value, but the monthly cost remains stable. Whereas rents in the same market will rise due to the increased value of homes.

A more reliable measure of home prices, the Case-Shiller Composite Home Price Index, was also released this week. It showed a nationwide increase of 5.6%, closer to Southern California’s rate than the CPI.

The Case-Shiller Index chart below looks very similar to the LA Times chart showing the boom in home prices beginning in 2012.

Home prices alone don’t tell the whole story. Renters are struggling the most. According to a recent report in the Orange County Register, the average rent for a house in Orange County is $3,114 per month and $2,548 for a home in Los Angeles County. The median household income in LA County is around $56,000, before taxes. So rent eats about 50-60% of wages. And Southern California is a microcosm of what is happening in many other cities in America.

The LA Times correctly identifies the market forces causing the price increases: “growing economy, rock-bottom mortgage rates and a shortage of homes on the market.”  And, of course, the LA Times shepherds government action to stop the surge in home values.

Government officials say they are trying to take steps to address the problem of affordability.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti is advocating for a fee on new development to raise money for below-market housing — a policy known as a “linkage fee” and used in cities such as San Francisco, San Diego and Oakland.

And in Sacramento, Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders have said they will put housing at the top of their agenda when they return in August from a monthlong break.

Legislators have proposed a package of bills aimed at raising money for subsidized housing and making it easier for developers to build all kinds of housing, which often faces pushback from residents concerned over traffic and neighborhood character.

Some cities in Southern California have already made some absurd laws trying to reduce cost of homes like banning Airbnb-type short-term rentals. Watch the video below where Activist Post’s Vin Armani explains this wrongheaded approach:

Markets tend to correct themselves without government interference. People also adapt. It’s one reason the co-living trend is exploding. However, sooner or later not enough people can afford house prices and a correction will begin. For instance, some people will move away and new housing units will be built to accommodate supply and demand.

Take a look as Case-Shiller’s HPI chart below from the boom-bust period of 2002 through 2008. You can clearly see the 2007 correction begin to have its effect.

After loose lending practices, low mortgage rates, and shady Wall Street re-packaging of housing debt enabled the boom period and inevitable bust, the downward trend continued until about 2012 as previously indicated.

Today rates are even lower. Lenders are getting creative again because Millennials don’t qualify due to high student debt and low wages. And Wall Street is as corrupt and greedy as ever. Combine that with the bloated municipalities in desirable areas making it expensive or impossible to get new building permits, and home prices may continue rising at this rate for a couple more years.

Jeff Paul writes for Activist Post and Counter Markets newsletter. Like us on Facebook, subscribe on YouTube, follow on Twitter and at Steemit.

This article is Creative Commons. You may republish in full with attribution and link to this post.

These Are The Most Expensive (And Best) Cities Around The World

Every year Deutsche Bank releases its fascinating index of real-time prices around the world which looks at the cost of goods and services from a purchase-price parity basis, to determine the most expensive - and in this year"s edition, best - cities. As have done on several occasions in the past, we traditionally focus on one specific subindex: the cost of "cheap dates" in the world"s top cities.

The index consists of i) cab rides, ii) dinner/lunch for two at a pub or diner, iii) soft drinks, iv) two movie tickets and a v) couple of beers. Deutsche Bank"s advice to those in Zurich is either to marry young or choose your blind dates carefully as its "cheap date" index continues to see Zurich as the most expensive place for courtship. Tokyo climbs to second and Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm make up the top 5. Indeed these 5 cities are also the most expensive for a haircut so the pre-date investment costs are also high!

If you"re in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Mexico a date is around a quarter of the cost of that in Zurich and a haircut about a tenth of the price. So if you"re young, free and single in Zurich, depending on how much you date it might be profitable to migrate to parts of Asia even after the salary sacrifice, the German bank suggests.

And while traditionally we end it here, focusing merely on the most (and least) expensive cities part of the study, this year it is worth expanding because what started off as a pet project for Jim Reid back in 2011 has turned into a purchase-price parity masterpiece, as well as a crowdsourced "quality of life" index, which ranks some 50 of the world"s top cities on par with any of the rankings seen in various other, more popular rankings such as that by Mercer. As the London-based banker writes, "We continue to add new cities, refine our methodology and while it’s impossible to exactly match products and services around the world we try to ensure as much uniformity as possible and then convert prices back to USD."

Some further details:

This year Deutsche has added a few new series. In particular average after-tax salaries, average 2-bed apartment rental costs and finally a quality-of-life index that is the most subjective measure in the report and will probably cause most arguments, debates and disagreements. A lot of the data in the report is crowdsourced (including this new quality-of-life index). Wellington, NZ comes out on top out of the 47 cities we cover based on purchasing power, crime, healthcare, cost of living, house prices, commuting time, pollution and climate. Edinburgh, Vienna, Melbourne, Zurich and Copenhagen are next. Of our 47 cities, the "mega cities" like Tokyo (rank 27), NYC (28), Paris (30), London (33), Shanghai (37) and Mumbai (45) rank very low mostly due to high living costs, crime, pollution and commuting time. Megacity dwellers may also forsake short-term quality of life for aspirational reasons with these cities providing more upside rewards from the average for those most successful.

Looking simply at most expensive cities, Reid finds that Zurich remains the most expensive place to do and buy a lot of things but does have the highest average salaries, followed by several US cities and then Sydney. London has slipped out of the top 10 post the Brexit-FX fall.  

Rents are highest in San Fran, HK, NYC, London and then Zurich. Of note: the difference for a 2 bedroom rental between the most expensive city, San Francisco, and India"s Bangalore, when indexed in USD is a whopping 12 times.

Zurich is home to the highest ‘disposable income after rents’ and at the top of the purchasing power index.

However it might depend on how many dates and haircuts you have in a month (see top chart) as to how wealthy you feel. At the other end of the scale if you"re in Jakarta, Manila, Rio, New Delhi and Istanbul and a job comes up in Zurich then you could potentially increase your salary by ten-fold. Mind the cost of living increases though.

Global brands continue to be relatively cheaper in the US than across its DM peers. The top 10 most expensive regions across goods and services remain dominated by European cities. Swiss and Nordic/Scandinavian cities in particular require a tolerant bank manager to enable consumption. If you find yourself on holiday in Turkey, Brazil, Russia or Greece try to avoid the Apple store as iPhones are  25-50% more expensive than in the US - still the cheapest place to buy. Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Canada only see a small premium over US prices.

The "weekend getaway" index reflects the general cost of living around the world but is perhaps biased by hotel costs.

Milan is the new number-one (very expensive hotels), followed by Copenhagen, Zurich, London, Stockholm, Vienna and NYC. Much lower hotel costs in Asia continue to keep these cities as attractive holiday destinations.

The "bad habits" index of cigarettes and beers is most costly in Australia, NZ and Singapore. At the opposite end of the spectrum it’s very cheap to indulge in such habits in the Czech Republic and South Africa.

If you relocate to Singapore, Copenhagen or Oslo consider a bike rather than a new car as duties etc. make the cost very prohibitive.

Avoid car rentals in Amsterdam and try not to get thirsty in Oslo (beer or coke)...

... and refrain from buying jeans and trainers in Copenhagen.

Petrol costs most in HK and public transport most in London.

Zurich also tops the rankings for most expensive movie tickets, while those who want to stay in shape will spend the most in Tokyo (with Zurich 2nd).

Hungry? A basic dinner will set up back some $73.70 in Zurich, while a full course dinner for two is most expensive in Oslo and costs just about $130.

Finally, new to this year’s study is a quality-of-life index of the 47 major cities DB collected prices for across the rest of this document. Figure 1 shows the overall index level plus the ranks for the individual components. The data has been collected by www.numbeo.com - a large crowd-sourced information database on global prices, quality of living etc. The data is based on the following 8 variables; purchasing power, safety, healthcare, cost of living, house prices/income, commuting time, pollution and climate.

Why Is The Cost Of Living So Unaffordable?

Via Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Strip away the centralized power that protects and funds cartels, and prices would plummet.

The mainstream narrative is "the problem is low wages." Actually, the problem is the soaring cost of living. If essentials such as healthcare, housing, higher education and government services were as cheap as they once were, a wage of $10 or $12 an hour would be more than enough to maintain a decent everyday life.

Here are some examples from the real world. In 1952, it cost $30 to have a baby in an excellent hospital. If we adjust that by official inflation as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistic"s inflation calculator to 2017, the cost would be $275. ($1 in 1952 = $9.16 in 2017).

What does it cost to have a baby delivered in a hospital today? $5,000? $10,000? Who even knows, given the convoluted billing process in today"s sickcare system?

The pharmaceutical cartel jacks up medication costs per dose from $3 tp $600, even when the medication has been around for decades: the Pinworm prescription jumps from $3 to up to $600 a pill Parents, doctors angry over drug price gouging (via John F.)

My father paid 1.8% of his wages for "hospital group insurance" in the early 1950s (for a household of four kids and two adults.) For someone earning $1,000 a week, the equivalent today would be $72 a month out of a monthly gross income of $4,000.

My spouse and I pay $1330 a month for barebones healthcare insurance in today"s sickcare system. Factor out subsidies paid by the employer or state, and minimal healthcare insurance costs tens of thousands of dollars per household annually.

Here"s a chart that illustrates the breathtaking rise in healthcare costs. Wages are the nearly flat line:

In the early to mid-1970s, my university tuition was $89.25 per semester (the University of Hawaii was a two-semester system), and student fees were $27 a semester, for a grand total of $232.50 per year. Books added another $170 per year, for a total cost of $400 to $450 for a university education.

$1 in 1975 = $5.51 today, so if tuition, fees and books had gone up along with official inflation, it would now cost $1,800 to $2,000 to attend a large state university annually--including tuition, fees and books.

An entire 4-year university education would cost $8,000. Instead, students now borrow $50,000 and up just to attend state university.

I"ve covered the skyrocketing cost basis of everyday life for a decade:

Lowering the Cost Structure of the U.S. Economy (August 29, 2008)

My recent exploration of soaring costs for everyday items, The Burrito Index: Consumer Prices Have Soared 160% Since 2001 (August 1, 2016), received quite a bit of interest, along with the companion piece on the source of much of the higher costs: Inflation Hidden in Plain Sight (August 2, 2016) Can we be honest and say that many of the reductions in value, quantity and quality are actually instances of fraud?

No Wrongdoing Here, Just 6,300 Corporate Fines and Settlements (May 2015)

Here"s a snapshot of urban rents. Recall that wages for the bottom 90% have been flatlined for decades.

Apologists claim these services have improved greatly in the past 30, 40 and 50 years, but this is only occasionally valid; university education, housing, burritos and conventional preventative care have often declined in quality and quantity, not gotten better.

Other apologists claim that Baumol"s Cost Disease explains all these tremendous increases in price; while this may be a factor in some price increases, it is more an excuse than an explanation.

Here"s what"s going on: cartels that have government backing can jack up prices at will, year after year, decade after decade, while wages have stagnated. Cartels have zero pressure to raise wages, while their immense profits fund vast propaganda/public-relations machines that translate into equally vast political influence.

Have you ever seen a non-profit foundation or a politico that didn"t support "more funding for healthcare and higher education"? Of course not. The healthcare, defense industry, Federal Reserve/banking sector and higher education cartels are all entrenched and self-serving.

The cartels have unlimited power to raise their prices, while the average wage-earner has essentially zero power to create non-cartel alternatives or influence central-state/central bank support of rapacious, parasitic cartels.

The "consumer" is supposed to have power, but that power only exists in an environment that enables level playing fields and transparent competition. Cartels buy political influence so the central state protects their pricing power and funds their rentier skims.

Strip away the centralized power that protects and funds cartels, and prices would plummet. I explain how this would work in higher education in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education. The same dynamics would radically transform the cost structure of housing, healthcare, defense and everything else currently controlled by monopolies or cartels.