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Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
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However in 1975 about 45% of women were in the workforce, today it is 60%. So although the cost of a house has increased slightly, and median wage has decreased slightly taking into account inflation, it is important to also factor in the effect of doubling the wage earners in a middle class family.
Over the last 70 years the US GDP has averaged a growth rate of slightly more than 3%.
So in reality the economic outlook for a middle class family with two wage earners is significantly better than it was 50 years ago when they only had 1.
Also, it is true that cars appear to be much more expensive today than they were in 1975 when adjusting for inflation. However, they are also much safer and they last much longer. A car that ran for 100,000 miles in 1975 was a big thing, but that is no longer true. Today 200,000 miles is realistic if you care for your car. There are 11 cars that have not had a single fatality since 2014, that is an amazing improvement over 50-60 years ago when deaths during the Vietnam war were dwarfed by traffic fatalities.
Computers, the internet and robots have played a major role in keeping our GDP growing. It is very likely that AI, Quantum computers, drones and self driving vehicles will continue to propel that growth.
Also, although these new technologies take away jobs, they also open them up. Consider how many handicapped people can be productively employed today versus 50 or 100 years ago.
50 years ago the biggest threat to our economy was the trade deficit due to our dependence on oil. Today it is reasonable to think that the US could ultimately become energy self sufficient.
When NAFTA was approved we lost many jobs to cheap labor overseas. Today we can replace that cheap labor with 3d printers and robots.
So the only real issue with our economic outlook is that we are going to change and can expect dramatic changes to take place.
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Expenses that have gone up starts with housing and the cost of real estate, of homeownership. And then, it continues on with health care, which is, as you know, astronomical and then schooling. A public university cost double what it did in 1996. And that's not a fancy private school. So I think that's kind of very telling, and a lot of the people are weighted down by educational debt. If we think about what it means to be a professional, it often means having, at least college and then potentially graduate school. So a lot of professionals are struggling to pay off six figure college loans.
Surveys show that women with children make less money. It's probably due to employe prejudice that they're going to be less productive. We have such limited maternity leave compared to most industrialized countries. Only 13 to 14% of Americans have paid family leave in their jobs, so that's very small. Employers feel like, oh, once I hire somebody who has a kid, this is going to be a cascade of latenesses and absences - things that are really often untrue and just bias. Yet there was a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis survey that found moms were more productive in their jobs than women without children.
And right now, two-thirds of women with kids under 6 are working. So that is a huge number. And those are kids who are often too young to be in kindergarten or even preschool. So that means that they're going to be needing day care. Of course the average cost varies from state to state. The Economic Policy Institute said the annual average cost of infant care in New York state is $14,000. So a New York family with one child pays 21 percent of their income on child care on average, and for two kids, that rises to 38.7 percent.