Post 11,000 - Just the Facts, Ma'am

In the arguments about whether young people have it easier or harder than Boomers financially, people rely on stories, either personal/family anecdotes, or statisticky claims.

In the 1950s you could support a family on a blue collar income, buy a house and a car and send the kids to college.  

People went on zero or one trip to Europe in a lifetime, and going anywhere else (unless you lived near Canada or Mexico) was unheard of.  

Here are the boring statistics you can play with yourself

This is how much people made at every level of society 1967-2022. It does not define poverty, middle class, 

This is the amount of inflation every year from 1967-2025 It includes purchasing power by sector. Medical is more expensive, apparel is cheaper.

I don't recommend you try and decipher how the Congressional Budget Office figures out poverty,  but it helps to know that the number is different before the county or the feds gave you any money or after. Were you poor before we helped you?  How about after?

They do not include the qualifiers, such as having only one car and no dryer, square footage of houses,  availability of varieties of food, women in the workplace, what taxes were, and whether kids these days even know how to shoe a horse. Those things are helpful in terms of understanding what lives were like then versus now, but I don't cover those here.