Ditto. My brother has supported 3 kids and a wife in a middle-class life on salary in the 50-60,000 range.
They don’t fly on their vacations. They kept an old car running long, long after most people would have bought a new one. They repair furniture some people would junk. The kids hand down clothes. They have dial-up internet on their computer (which was a gift). They spend $100/kid or less at Christmas.
It can be done; most of us don’t want to.
Actually, my wife doesn’t work outside the home, we have three kids, and my salary isn’t an order of magnitude higher than my brother’s by any means. And we live in one of the most expensive areas of the country.
We manage by keeping expectations low, and expenses as low as we can manage. If we hadn’t had to just shell out $6,000 for a new heat pump just this week, we would be relatively debt free.
Of course, debt ought to exist to buy things like heat pumps, right?
Of course, now we are in a situation where some blue collar jobs can’t be filled because we’re sending all of our kids to college instead of trade schools.
My brother will likely have a job for the rest of his life - he may have to move someday to ensure security, but that is true for most of us. My brother-in-law is an engineer, and he can’t find enough machinists. The ones he can get can make six figures depending on their skill level.
First of all, as someone said earlier, the one-income earner was a mid-20th century anomoly for low- and middle-class people. Women previously were either intimately involved in running a farm or other family business, or in urban areas worked a full work week whether within or outside of the home. Children often were put to work at a far younger age than they are now, and it wasn’t so they could buy designer shoes.
With our 2-income families we are living a life beyond the wildest dreams of all but the very wealthiest 200 years ago. One of the components of that which we often don’t recognize is health care. Regardless of what you think of the quality of care either in the US or elsewhere, there are a ton of things paid, whether directly, via insurance or via taxation, that didn’t even exist 200 years ago: vaccinations, antibiotics, most surgeries, just for starters. In fact, most of what we now consider the basics that everyone should be entitled to didn’t even exist in 1800. We think of our paycheck as being our total compensation, but when you add in what our employer is paying for health insurance it’s more than we realize. A hundred years ago you didn’t pay income tax. But then, if you were poor and/or elderly and/or disabled, you didn’t get much to speak of in terms of health care, either. We could live more cheaply if we didn’t insist that most of our children live to adulthood and that we be treated for everything from athlete’s foot to heart failure.
I agree with the previous poster that we can certainly exist on one salary if we live the way people did in the 1940s. I certainly did so when my children were pre-schoolers. Of course, I did as my mother did: All our meals were cooked at home based on carefully-budgeted menus. I used an electric clothes dryer only when the weather made it mandatory – clothers, including the cloth diapers (half of which were hand-me-downs from my sister’s children) were hung outside to dry. I didn’t own a diswasher. We never went on vacation. We rarely if ever went to the movies or other entertainment. If I had someplace within the neighborhood to go to, I walked or rode my bike (with a child in a carrier) unless it was raining. Even at that, we had lots of extras my parents didn’t have: a second car, a television, a much larger house and yard, meat almost every day of the week, window air conditioners, and a telephone, just to name a few.
What no one else here has mentioned is the increased tax burden. In 1930, the total combined tax as a percentage of income was around 11.6%. In 2007, the total was close to 33%. (Cite ). We need two family incomes today because one income goes almost exclusively to feeding the government.
It’s a mistake to think that people in the early part of the 20th century lived in such grinding poverty, though - even my dad who did live in grinding poverty and was born in 1931, they went to the movies all the time, much more often than we go now. Then again, it was probably comparably cheaper, but people used to see a lot more films than we do now. It isn’t like they never went out or anything.
There are many factors that caused our society to be where it is today.
Women went to work in great numbers in the '40’s to support the war effort. They were badly needed to replace the men who went to war. That is the beginning of women working.
There were not so many things to buy then. No television, no computers, no cell phones, no car insurance, little insurance of any kind.
Insurance companies have caused the rise in health care and the abuse there is in that field. Insurance companies always cause prices to go up, and will continue to do so. Most countries provide national health care for all their citizens at much lower costs than ours, and yes, the care is as good or better than what we receive here in the US. When I was young we paid the doctor and dentist bills out of our wages. My first baby cost a little over $200 hospital and doctor.
I remember when we got service from companies: gas was pumped for us, groceries were put in the car for us, etc. Now they won’t even answer the phone, you have to deal with a machine. Walmart wants you check out and sack your own groceries. No way. Consumers need to take back their power and demand better service and lower prices. We buy so much stuff we don’t need. But all that being said I would not trade the US for any country in the world.
I know the pendulum will swing back some day. Hopefully we will have a strong middle class again. Countries with just very rich and very poor people either lose their freedom or digress into fighting.
God Bless America
This is a bit misleading as well.
A movie in the early forties cost about a quarter. Adjusting for inflation shows that that same movie ought to cost three bucks today. Instead, we pay closer to ten.
Attendance at movies was a good bit higher then. Most of the take from movies today is from high ticket prices and home viewing.
This is just a few odd memories to support everyone else’s statement that people made do with a lot less.
I remember as a child getting our first clothes dryer. Before that Mom hung the wash to dry on a clothesline. My Grandma talked about getting her first automatic washer. Before that it was a washboard and a crank wringer. Although using the wringer was a lot easier than hand-wringing the clothes, the automatic washer was even better.
In my house, which was built in the late twenties, most rooms only have one electrical outlet, because what would you plug in besides a lamp? There’s a chimney in the kitchen and a section of brick floor for what would have been a wood burning stove. The day after laundry day, a housewife would spend the day ironing and the iron would be heated on that wood burning stove. It would have been cold in the morning before the stove heated up - - the floor heaters were obviously added later.
Less stuff. Less energy (or, rather, more of your own). Less comfort. Less cost.
There’s an interesting graphic in Wikipedia showing that house prices are at historic highs now, whereas in the '20s and '30s they were at historic lows. Historically, house prices cost around three times annual income, and it’s generally much higher than that today (not to mention the fact that “annual income” usually includes two incomes).
But otherwise I think people have nailed it above – higher taxes, higher consumer expectations, and higher relative housing prices all account for the disequilibrium you feel.
There are too many variables (e.g. the steady increases in total taxation for middle-class families) to really single out one of them.
Let’s put this into perspective (and hopefully not go too far out on a tangent). When I was young, this was the case, too. But we didn’t get the level of treatment then that we do now; in fact, a lot of what can be gotten now didn’t exist then.
We did not get immunized for ANYTHING except smallpox. We went to the dentist at most once a year, and if the drilling hurt, oh well. In my case, it was decided not to get some baby teeth filled because they were scheduled to fall out on their own within the year; they abscessed instead. But then, an extraction was probably cheaper than a filling.
Much before the 1940s, you didn’t get penicillin for a throat infection, either; you just hoped you didn’t get complicatons that damaged your heart. If you did have a bad valve or a heart attack, well, you hoped for the best.
The list goes on and on, including prenatal care.
The issue of government vs. private insurance and the issue of US vs. non-US health care is a separate issue.
Another thing I didn’t mention earlier: the high cost of leisure time. Workers in the 1920s had 40 hour work weeks, but their activities during their time off were far more modest than their peers today.
1920s: $
2000s: $$$$$$$
Even when I was growing up in the 1970s, weekend recreational activities were simple. When was the last time you saw throngs of people having a picnic while watching planes take off at the airport? It was a very common leisure activity of the day.
I’d second that a lot of extra costs are related to convenience and luxury purchases. I’m only 31, but when I was a kid, I would never have fathomed having a house as big as I do now or as much stuff. Plus, when I go to the store, there are so many different variations of the same thing. Instead of choosing from three different types of dishwashing liquid, I can choose from 20 (do I want aromatherapy liquid or regular, antibacterial or not, and so on). Same goes with handsoap and body wash (remember Irish Spring and Ivory?). Also, buying new furniture if it was possible to refinish and repair the old stuff was considered a huge extravagance. And going out to dinner? Even McDonald’s was considered a treat (even though not high class).
And what about microwaves? They’re considered a necessity in most households. The above made me remember when we got our first one. My sister and I would stand in front of that thing every time we used it, looking for other stuff to nuke.
I work but I don’t have medical insurance, so I’m kinda in the old days myself. There are 45 million Americans like me. Things haven’t changed as much as you think they have, for a lot of us.
But all those new things aren’t included in that $850 ballpark figure I cited above.
(According to those inflation calculators online that’s about 70 bucks in 1928 dollars.) All that is is my mortgage (which is quite low - I’m only paying off 75,000 of this house because I was able to save up and borrow from my dad a huge downpayment), half my power bill, the water, and the phone bill. Includes taxes, which I believe are higher now, but no cable, no cel phone, nothing they didn’t have then. No food or gas or ice or entertainment or radio or clothes or anything else they would have bought either. Does anybody have a quick reference for blue collar male white average income in 1928?
Come on, people. The numbers for the upper class have gone nowhere but up for the last decade or two, while the numbers for the middle class have been stagnant. It’s obvious what is happening – the wealthy are looting the middle class. Your family’s health insurance is vanishing while their third home in Bimini is appearing. You’re being shorn like sheep and you don’t even have enough sense to bleat about it. You’re too busy feeling guilty because you have a CD player and great grandpa didn’t.
Pathetic.
Well, according to Time Magazine in 1930, the largest number of people reported income under $3,000 in that year. Doesn’t seperate urban from rural or black from white, however. (24 people had incomes over 5 million, though.) $3,000 in 1928 dollars by the same inflation calculator is about $36,000 in today’s money. Of course, we all know those things can be pretty inexact, though.
That’s at today’s dollar and today’s rates of inflation.
The average annual wage in manufacturing, according to this site was $1,424.
That varies region to region. Mine (for a condo) is about $17/mth. But power here is cheap. It was probably in the ones of dollars back then.
Most people didn’t have insurance. Lots of people didn’t have vehicles. Phones - again, lots of people didn’t have them, many had party lines, and I doubt there was a very high charge for the service. Your $850 is, I think, very high.
You can’t just “cut the power bill in half” - in 1920 how much electricity did the house use? Was it even wired for electricity? (my old 1917 house wasn’t electrified until the 1930s - nor did it have gas - coal and woodburning stoves). They wouldn’t have had a phone. They likely wouldn’t have owned a car - and when they did, early cars were priced to be affordable (of course, they also lacked things we consider basic - like a choice of color). They probably wouldn’t have had homeowners insurance. There bills, compared to yours, would have been their mortgage (and, as pointed out, THAT has certainly increased, though I doubt it has to do with women working and has to do with more people living in the same area - supply and demand). They may have kept a horse or used streetcars - or they may have simply walked where they needed to go (depending on the size of the town). Then they would have had fuel (wood and/or coal), maybe a gas bill (but not for certain). City water? Maybe, maybe not. Their tax burden would have been miniscule - no social security taxes, small income taxes, and very likely no sales taxes. They wouldn’t have paid for health insurance - no such thing.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I knew a girl in junior high (this would have been 1977) who was just getting indoor plumbing and had just had the house wired for electricity when she was in elementary school. The house was heated by wood stove - and in the winter the whole family slept in the room with the stove. Water - you pumped it.
My parents first mortgage (in 1968 - so not that long ago) was $112 a month - including taxes and insurance).
