On February 25, 2020, Hillary Hoffower writes on Business Insider:
- The typical US male worker needs more than one year’s salary to afford the typical costs of a family of four, according to a new report by the Manhattan Institute.
- In 1985, it took him 30 weeks’ pay to afford $13,227 in expenditures, versus 53 weeks’ pay to afford $54,441 in 2018.
- It’s evidence of the dire state of the American middle class, which is struggling as living costs outpace wage increases.
The American economy may be booming, but its middle class is struggling.
The median male US worker now has to earn more than a year’s salary to afford the annual expenses for a family of four, according to “The Cost of Thriving Index” published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and previously reported by The Washington Post.
In 1985, the typical male worker needed 30 weeks’ pay to cover the $13,227 required for a family of four’s major living costs: housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. As of 2018, those expenditures had risen to $54,441, and the typical male worker has to work 53 weeks to get there (shown in the chart below). “This is a problem, as there are only 52 weeks in a year,” Oren Cass, the report’s lead author, wrote.
The index looked at the US Bureau Labor of Statistics’ estimates for the median weekly earnings of men older than 25 who are employed full time as wage and salary workers.
Cass formulated the index on male earnings because men are historically considered the family breadwinners. His findings for a female breadwinner are even more telling: In 1985, she needed to work 45 weeks to afford the four annual expenses, compared with 66 weeks in 2018.
Both men and women are below the cost-of-thriving line in the above charts, as measured by the Manhattan Institute. That means a single-earner household cannot thrive on the median US income.
Living costs are outpacing wage increases
The “Cost of Thriving Index” points to tensions underlying the American economy, from the gender pay gap to skyrocketing living costs that have outpaced wage increases, particularly for younger generations.
Those between ages 25 and 34 have seen only a $29 income increase since 1974, when adjusted for inflation, according to a new SuperMoney report that analyzed US Census Bureau data. Adults ages 35 to 44 made nearly $2,900 more in 2017 than their 1974 counterparts did, while those ages 45 to 54 saw an income growth of nearly $5,400 over that same time period, adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, college tuition has more than doubled since the 1970s, bringing the national student-loan debt to an all-time high of $1.5 trillion. According to Student Loan Hero, the average student-loan debt for a student who took out loans and graduated in 2018 was a whopping $29,800.
The price of home sales has increased by 39% since the 1970s, and national healthcare costs per person have increased by $9,000 in the same time frame, according to the SuperMoney report.
The increase in so many disparate costs shows that middle-class Americans carry several financial burdens — they’re behind on homeownership, lagging in retirement savings, and have debt to pay off, according to a previous Insider and Morning Consult survey.
When all the paychecks from one year don’t pay off a family’s living costs, our typical male worker will feel he’s living paycheck to paycheck, but it’s actually worse than that.
Gary Reber Comments:
This article highlights the reality for the vast majority of Americans, who are increasing becoming job serfs, enslaved to full dependency on the wealthy capital asset ownership class or government for their income. They are propertyless in productive capital assets.
Our current system is a system rigged to continually concentrate the ownership of productive capital in the 1 to 5 percent of the population. Also exposed are the dire moral implications of the current system, which is presently propelled by greed in our society. A new system that would ensure equal opportunity for every child, woman, and man to acquire productive capital with the earnings of capital and broaden its ownership universally does not require people to be any better than they presently are, but it does enable our society to leverage both greed and generosity in a way that honestly recognizes and harnesses productive capital as the factor that exponentially produces the wealth in a technologically advanced society.
The resulting impact of our current approaches has been plutocratic government and concentration of capital ownership, which denies every citizen his or her pursuit of economic happiness (property). Market-sourced income (through concentrated capital ownership) has concentrated in individuals and families who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer products and services. They already have most of what they want and need, so they invest their excess in new productive power, making them richer and richer through greater capital ownership –– the means used by the wealthy to become more wealthy. This is the source of the distributional bottleneck that makes the private property, market economy ever more dysfunctional. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital ownership concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people who depend entirely on wages from their labor or government welfare and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. The production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result.
