This is probably why you are broke and stuff

[JaneyVee]

[DJ13]

1. Mr. Reich gets it

Heres the trailer to his documentary "INEQUALITY FOR ALL", I love this guy.

[toby jo]

10. Dammit.

[progressoid]

2. He needs to head Obama's economic team.

[ReRe]

3. Wish we could start a Foundation...

... to pump thousands of free copies of it into red states. Or Free showings in theaters, like on Sat mornings, or Sunday afternoons.

[AndyA]

4. This should be a commercial on the teevee

So all those "low information" American Idol types will see it. Excellent video!! Thanks for posting.

[Rebellious Republican]

5. First you have to get passed the corporate heads that own the TV.

[daleanime]

6. K&R....

And bookmarked.

[robbob]

7. Are those the actual salries they made/make

Or are they adjusting the present day salaries to account for inflation? Because if people are making fewer actual dollars then they were 40 years ago, THAT is an outrage.

...I mean it sucks anyways if wages haven't kept up with inflation but if those are the actual dollar incomes of jobs today then when you account for inflation wages have gone down by an incredible amount.

[jtuck004]

8. Actual salaries. And you are correct. n/t

[frazzled]

11. No, these figures have to be adjusted for inflation

Because I can bet you a thousand bucks a bank teller did not make $27K in the 1970s in 1970s dollars. The mean household income in the US in 1975 (just to take the middle year of that decade) was $13,779. (See Census statistics at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-104.pdf )

The average salary of a public school teacher in 1974-75 was $11,641, whereas in 2005-6 (the latest for which this site has data) the average salary was $49,109 (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_075.asp )

[magical thyme]

12. there is very small print under the 70s wages that says "adjusted for inflation"

so no, they are not making fewer actual dollars. But the dollars buy a lot less now than then.

[demigoddess]

14. In the 70s most homes were one income

since then we have had to have two income families and then you subtract day care and we have also gone from one car families to two cars in every driveway. Food prices have doubled as well.

[mountain grammy]

9. But if two people together are bank tellers

they make almost $50,000/year.. We're in the money!!....

[JEB]

13. At 61 fucking years, I'm working harder than I ever have

just to keep my head above water.

[rurallib]

15. hard to believe Obama could pass up people like Reich, Krugman, Dean Baker

[SheilaT]

16. Aside from basic things going up in cost

there's another aspect to why we are broke that isn't often discussed. And it's that we typically need and want many more things than we did forty years ago. Like computers, and cell phones, and the internet. Don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing anyone for wanting and having those things. I have all of those myself. But there simply was no equivalent to them in the '70s, let alone earlier. Kind of like by 1940 or so very many households in this country had electricity.

I have read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books any number of times, and one thing that I've noticed is how very little cash they needed to survive. Nowadays, it takes a remarkable amount of cash just to survive at the lower rungs of the economy.