When I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was living a middle class lifestyle. Homes were very affordable, nobody had anxiety about paying for healthcare, gasoline was extremely cheap, and grocery prices were not a concern at all.
Beef was so cheap in those days, and we ate like kings.
But now who can afford to eat beef on a regular basis?
Perhaps the wealthy can, but for most of us a simple visit to the grocery store is very painful.
In fact, many Americans now skip meals on a regular basis just to save money.
And a single trip to the hospital can mean financial ruin.
This is what life is like in America today.
Yes, we are making far more money than we once did.
But the purchasing power of our money has declined much faster than our paychecks have risen.
The fact that median household income is 9.7 times higher than it was in 1971 sounds like great news.
But the bad news is that the amount of gold that the median household income can buy has dropped by 88 percent since 1971.
If you look at the chart above, you will see that our standard of living has really been going downhill since the year 2000.
Needless to say, those at the bottom of the economic pyramid have been hit the hardest.
In a different post, Adam Livingston also pointed out that the federal minimum wage has lost about 95 percent of its value since 1971 when measured in gold
Nobody can survive on the federal minimum wage today.
$7.25 times 40 hours a week is just $290.
And that is before taxes.
Nobody can afford rent, utilities, food and healthcare on such an income.
In fact, much of the country cannot afford rent, utilities, food and healthcare at this stage.
For 46-year-old Cindy Banda, just keeping the house, providing the basics for her kids and paying for her cancer treatment has become a seemingly impossible task…
Even if you have a decent job, trying to survive in this harsh economic environment is exceedingly difficult.
And now decent jobs are disappearing all around us.
31-year-old Lissette Ramos has submitted hundreds of job applications over the past year, and she still can’t find anything…
Gone is the daily office commute. Now, after tending to her cats in the morning, Ramos heads straight to her desk to check the daily job alerts. She spends four to eight hours scouring sites like LinkedIn, Indeed and HiringCafe, customizing her resume for positions that fit her qualifications. At 5 p.m., she feeds her cats, goes for a walk to get in her 10,000 steps and returns home to lift weights before settling in for the evening.
Yet one year and hundreds of applications later, she is still stuck in a job search catch-22 – overqualified for entry-level work yet sidelined for junior and mid-level roles.
I feel so bad for those that are out of work right now.
Most resumes get discarded by AI hiring screeners before they are ever seen by a human…
New technology has made applying for a job easier than ever, flooding recruiters with resumes and creating massive bottlenecks. What’s more, these AI hiring screeners can filter out and reject candidates so employers often don’t see their application.
Rutgers public policy professor Carl Van Horn, who has studied unemployment trends for 40 years, frequently hears from applicants who submit hundreds of resumes without a single human reply. Omit the right keywords and “they’ve put their resume into the abyss,” he said.
If you don’t have personal connections, searching for a job can be so daunting.
Unfortunately, more good jobs are being eliminated with each passing day.
For example, American Express just announced that they will be cutting thousands of jobs…
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