Just like people think it sucks to alive in today's America, I would never want to be alive during the time my parents lived in.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
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24 Statistics To Show To Anyone Who Believes That America Has A Bright Economic Future
#7 To get the same purchasing power that you got out of $20.00 back in 1913 you would have to have more than $457 today.
http://
http://www.
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Then and Now: How the Economy Has Changed Since 9/11
by Catherine New Sep 11th 2011 7:00AM
Updated Sep 12th 2011 12:07PM
Think back to the evening of Sept. 10, 2001: It's been 10 years, and in some ways, it's as if nothing has changed. That Monday night, the United States was coming off a recession stemming from a bursting bubble, consumer confidence was declining, and predatory lending was in the headlines.
But as we all know, everything did change the next morning, in ways that we are still working to understand.
The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 were only one element of what shaped the last 10 years, but those traumatic events magnified and accelerated underlying trends already in motion in the U.S. economy, such as the shift from manufacturing to services, the move away from small businesses to big ones, and the opaque power of bubbles.
Over the last decade, consumer confidence and housing prices have gone through a dramatic rise and fall, and two massively expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were initiated. We asked a number of economists to share their thoughts on two questions: What were the most significant economic shifts between 2001 and 2011; and if that decade had a headline, what would it be. Here is what they told DailyFinance.
more here:
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/09/11/then-and-now-how-the-economy-has-changed-since-9-11/
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60 Years of American Economic History, Told in 1 Graph
Jordan Weissmann Aug 23 2012, 3:17 PM ET
In the 60 years after World War II, the United States built the world's greatest middle class economy, then unbuilt it. And if you want a single snapshot that captures the broad sweep of that transformation, you could do much worse than this graph from a new Pew report, which tracks how average family incomes have changed at each rung of the economic ladder from 1950 through 2010.
Here's the arc it captures: In the immediate postwar period, America's rapid growth favored the middle and lower classes. The poorest fifth of all households, in fact, fared best. Then, in the 1970s, amid two oil crises and awful inflation, things ground to a halt. The country backed off the postwar, center-left consensus -- captured by Richard Nixon's comment that "we're all Keynesians now" -- and tried Reaganism instead. We cut taxes. Technology and competition from abroad started whittling away at blue collar jobs and pay. The financial markets took off. And so when growth returned, it favored the investment class -- the top 20 percent, and especially the top 5 percent (and, though it's not on this chart, the top 1 percent more than anybody).
more here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/60-years-of-american-economic-history-told-in-1-graph/261503/
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U.S. Women on the Rise as Family Breadwinner
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: May 29, 2013
Women are not only more likely to be the primary caregivers in a family. Increasingly, they are primary breadwinners, too.
Four in 10 American households with children under age 18 now include a mother who is either the sole or primary earner for her family, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census and polling data released Wednesday. This share, the highest on record, has quadrupled since 1960.
The shift reflects evolving family dynamics.
For one, it has become more acceptable and expected for married women to join the work force. It is also more common for single women to raise children on their own. Most of the mothers who are chief breadwinners for their families — nearly two-thirds — are single parents.
The recession may have played a role in pushing women into primary earning roles, as men are disproportionately employed in industries like construction and manufacturing that bore the brunt of the layoffs during the downturn. Women, though, have benefited from a smaller share of the job gains during the recovery; the public sector, which employs a large number of women, is still laying off workers.
Women’s attitudes toward working have also changed. In 2007, before the recession officially began, 20 percent of mothers told Pew that their ideal situation would be to work full time rather than part time or not at all. The share had risen to 32 percent by the end of 2012.
The public is still divided about whether it is a good thing for mothers to work. About half of Americans say that children are better off if their mother is at home and doesn’t have a job. Just 8 percent say the same about a father. Even so, most Americans acknowledge that the increasing number of working women makes it easier for families “to earn enough to live comfortably.”
more here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/business/economy/women-as-family-breadwinner-on-the-rise-study-says.html?_r=0
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4/26/2013 @ 9:07AM
Economically, Russia Is Roughly Where the United States Was In The 1950's
While Russia’s economy has, by its own standards, performed quite well over the past thirteen years, the country’s overall level of development remains very far behind the level of an advanced Western country. In looking around for some data to try and prove this point I came across a very interesting historical dataset of per capita GDP from The Conference Board. I put a chart together that gives a pretty clear indication of just how underdeveloped Russia remains in comparison to the United States. This chart shows US GDP per capita from 1948-58 and Russian GDP per capita from 1998-2008 (the last year available in the dataset).
In the decade from 1998, as you can see, the Russian economy grew much more rapidly than the American economy did in the decade from 1948. But what interests me is that in 2008, at the peak of the energy boom and after a decade of run-away growth, Russia’s GDP per capita was still lower than the United States had been back in 1950. Think about that for just a moment. Despite all of the bluster about being an “energy superpower” and all of the hyperventilation that “the bear is back,” Russia’s economy is less developed than the United State’s was more than a half century ago.
And the United States in the 1950′s, as you might recall, had a couple of pretty serious issues. Across the South, African Americans were systematically disenfranchised and subject to political violence condoned, if not actively supported, by local power structures and state governments. Jim Crow was alive and well and, for a good portion of the decade, schools were still legally segregated. Women were limited from most high-end professions and most of the elite educational institutions, and sexism of a sort we have a hard time imaging these days was perfectly conventional. There was universal conscription, and the country spent something like 10% of GDP on the Pentagon and the global struggle against communism. Immigration laws explicitly discriminated against non-Europeans. Obviously the 1950′s weren’t all bad, there were clearly a number of redeeming features of the society at the time, but they nonetheless were a time before Martin Luther King Jr, before the Civil Rights act, and before any of the other major legal and political reforms that helped make the country we know today.
more here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2013/04/26/economically-russia-is-roughly-where-the-united-states-was-in-the-1950s/
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40 'Frightening' Facts On The Fall Of The US Economy
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/27/2013 14:49 -0400
Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
40 Statistics About The Fall Of The U.S. Economy That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe
If you know someone that actually believes that the U.S. economy is in good shape, just show them the statistics in this article. When you step back and look at the long-term trends, it is undeniable what is happening to us. We are in the midst of a horrifying economic decline that is the result of decades of very bad decisions. 30 years ago, the U.S. national debt was about one trillion dollars. Today, it is almost 17 trillion dollars. 40 years ago, the total amount of debt in the United States was about 2 trillion dollars. Today, it is more than 56 trillion dollars. At the same time that we have been running up all of this debt, our economic infrastructure and our ability to produce wealth has been absolutely gutted. Since 2001, the United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities and millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas. Our share of global GDP declined from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011. The percentage of Americans that are self-employed is at a record low, and the percentage of Americans that are dependent on the government is at a record high. The U.S. economy is a complete and total mess, and it is time that we faced the truth.
The following are 40 statistics about the fall of the U.S. economy that are almost too crazy to believe...
#1 Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars...
more here:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-27/40-frightening-facts-fall-us-economy
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Cost of Living in the 1950’s as Compared to Today in 2011
Living Large
If you were to live like someone in the 1950s, you could live fairly comfortably. Indeed, by mid-twentieth century standards you’d be well-off, even with a modest income. However, living in a small house with one television, no cable or satellite service, one car, no air conditioning, and so on is seen as a low standard of living in 2011. You could certainly cut back some. Do you really need three high-definition TVs or a 3,000-square-foot house? You likely need a computer and Internet service, because that’s simply the way the world is now. Mobile phones are more of a necessity now as well. Have you looked for a pay phone lately?
Perhaps we need to assess what we really want from our standard of living, and adjust our expenditures accordingly. On average we are living better now than at any point in history, but the key to happiness may be in finding ways to make it more affordable.
more here:
http://yesiamcheap.com/2011/
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Our high, high standard of living
by Philip Brewer on 9 September 2007
In the 1950s and 1960s, a working man could support a family at a middle-class standard of living with just one income. It might surprise you to learn that one person working full-time, even at minimum wage, can still support a family of four at that standard of living. Nowadays we call that "living in poverty."
According to John E Schwarz in Illusions of Opportunity:
"In the early 1950s, fully two fifths of American households had no automobile, about a third did not have a private telephone or a television, and the homes of about a third of all Americans were dilapidated or were without running water or a private toilet and bath. Only a small minority of families enjoyed such basics as a mixer or had a hot-water heater."
Those dilapidated shacks without hot water improved over the years, but as late as 1970 the median single-family home was still less than 1400 square feet (versus over 2200 now).
more here:
http://www.wisebread.com/our-
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5 Complaints About Modern Life (That Are Statistically B.S.)
By: Mark M., M. Asher Cantrell January 31, 2011
In general, it's easier to be negative. It's easier for us at Cracked, because it's easier to write jokes about terrible things than nice things. It's easier for us as a generation, because to admit that the world isn't that bad right now would be to admit that we have it easier than our grandparents did and that the world thus has the right to expect more from us.
But as much as we like to joke about the sorry state of the world, the facts really don't back us up.
#5. "Everything Is So Expensive."
The Complaint:
"The corporations and the government have us all living like slaves. I can back it up with numbers, too -- in 1950 you could buy a brand new nine-room brick home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for the whopping sum of $11,500. A decent family car was about $500, and the gas for it was about 25 cents a gallon. A large loaf of bread cost under 15 cents. A large coffee was a nickel, with a free refill. I could go on and on. But now between greedy corporations and the government confiscating our income with sky-high taxes, you have to work two jobs just to survive."
The Reality:
Let's start with the obvious: A low-end job in the service industry paid a dollar an hour in 1950. A fancy job in insurance or real estate? A buck-fifty an hour. You'd take home $50 a week after taxes. So please don't talk about the good old days of 50-cent steaks when people were getting paid what would now be Tooth Fairy money.
So how does this all average out, once you account for income? We don't have to guess. Punch anything into the cost of living calculator -- the one that uses the exact same formula that the government uses to decide things like tax rates -- and you'll see that the prices of most things have stayed pretty constant over the years. High-end manufactured goods have gotten cheaper. Much cheaper, as manufacturing costs drop.
In 1954, the cost of a high-end Westinghouse color TV, with a massive 15-inch screen, was $1,295. No, not adjusted for inflation. That was the actual price at the time -- half of the yearly income for some families. Everybody writes this off as if it's a constant of the universe ("of course new technology gets exponentially better and cheaper with time!") instead counting it among the benefits of the modern system. Why? This economic system has resulted in handheld devices that can access all of the porn ever created, at a price affordable to the working man, and all we can do is complain about the cost of unlimited data plans?
And the golden age of the $500 car... how many of you come from families with two cars? Statistically it's most of you, and far more than what it would have been in 1960, when there were half as many cars on a per-capita basis in the U.S. (it averaged about one car per household -- so if you had two, someone else had none).
And taxes? Again, the numbers don't lie -- in the U.S. taxes are the lowest they've been since 1950, and now that the Bush-era tax cuts have been temporarily extended, they will continue to be until 2012 at the soonest. The government even threw you an extra two percent reduction in payroll tax as a cherry on top. The U.S. has the second-lowest taxes among developed countries.
Yes, we're going through a worldwide downturn and yes, a bunch of you are unemployed. Those of you who are reading this at a homeless shelter, we're not saying it's all in your head. But on the whole we could use a little perspective.
more here:
http://www.cracked.com/
source(s):
A low-end job in the service industry paid a dollar an hour in 1950. -> http://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/
cost of living calculator -> http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/
Westinghouse color TV $1,295 ->
compare that to this LED HDTV ->
LG 55" 1080p 120Hz LED-LCD TV -> new link here:
$1,035.20
![LG 55LN5400 55" Class (54.6" Diagonal) 1080p TruMotion 120hz LED-LCD HDTV](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vdLnrBtmEHzstVSK8fdJ1xGMFw_e2kKwW6A65GEsBj4zkqm0oBsmFWS5K0uVGzYKzs5YJZEyDHjcA3yYqcv29Z4F3iGBzyNJulAVo9MTg_9B8zVYErom-19PPrtQ=s0-d "LG 55LN5400 55" Class (54.6" Diagonal) 1080p TruMotion 120hz LED-LCD HDTV")
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0ZX1927571
more screens here:
http://www.newegg.com/LED-TVs/SubCategory/ID-798
there were half as many cars on a per-capita basis in the U.S. ->
http://www.econ.nyu.edu/dept/
in the U.S. taxes are the lowest they've been since 1950, -> http://www.usatoday.com/money/
The U.S. has the second-lowest taxes among developed countries. -> http://www.businesspundit.com/
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More than Half the Homes in U.S. Have Three or More TVs
July 20, 2009
New findings from Nielsen’s Television Audience Report show that in 2009 the average American home had 2.86 TV sets, which is roughly 18% higher than in 2000 (2.43 sets per home), and 43% higher than in 1990 (2.0 sets). In addition, there continue to be more TVs per home than people – in 2009 the average U.S. home had only 2.5 people vs 2.86 television sets.
Other Key Stats
There are 114.5 million TV homes in the U.S. in 2009
* 38% of U.S. TV homes have digital cable.
* 88% have a DVD player, while VCR fell to 72%.
* 82% of homes have more than 1 television set.
* 11% of U.S. TV homes only have the capability to receive TV reception “over the air”. These homes have neither cable nor ADS.
chart n stuff here:
http://blog.nielsen.com/
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Poverty now comes with a color TV
Census data find an ever-growing material prosperity, with formerly high-dollar luxury items now commonplace in even poor households.
By Christian Science Monitor
In case there was any doubt, a study has confirmed that Americans have a lot of what economists know, technically, as stuff.
The computer has surpassed the dishwasher as a standard household appliance. The poorest Americans have posted a sharp rise in access to air conditioning. The richest Americans still own the most cars, but they are choosing to own slightly fewer of them than they used to.
These Census findings, released in December, were true even before gifts piled up under trees.
These nuggets provide a glimpse of American lifestyles that isn't captured in the raw data of monthly economic reports. At a time of concern about the standard of living for future generations, the study offers hopeful signs of tangible progress, even as the pace of income growth has slowed in recent years.
It's only one piece of the overall picture of economic progress and doesn't resolve the question about future generations. But it confirms that what the Census Bureau calls "material well-being" abounds for regular folks today in ways that Louis XIV -- for all his palaces, silk stockings and ruffled finery -- could barely have imagined.
True, most of us don't have an entourage of fawning servants, and while U.S. homes have expanded in square footage, they hardly rival Versailles. But modern appliances, in many ways, are robotic servants who sometimes break down but have yet to stage an organized revolt.
more stuff and a chart here:
http://articles.moneycentral.
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In conclusion, the United States economy sucks according to the majority, so I guess it sucks.
