"The American Dream Died in February 1973"

I have known for years that wages stopped going up in January 1973. Let's put it this way: when I was a little kid blue-collar workers had a home and a fishing cabin in the mountains. Try that today.

I owned a taxi for five years. When I first started an older man told me he worked 11 months, then took a month off, put his wife in the sidecar of his motorcycle - and toured the U.S. for a month.

This article is from the site Reality Base and was written by Roger Chittum.

"Since Bob Herbert wrote about Reviving the Dream today, this is a good time to put up the problem-defining graphs from a longer analysis I haven't finished.

"The American middle class and working class are essentially the more than 90 million non-supervisory 'production workers' who constitute 84% of non-government, non-farm employment. For 26 years, from 1947 to January 1973, their average hourly pre-tax earnings, adjusted for inflation using current methods, grew robustly and steadily at an average annual 'real' rate of about 2.2%. At that rate, average purchasing power would double in 33 years. Parents expected their children to have more prosperous lives than their own, and it was happening. It was the Golden Age of the Middle Class. Then, suddenly and permanently, it ended in February 1973."

The rest is HERE, with many graphs.