Also, the inflation for luxuries leaves regular inflation in the dust.
Back around 1960, $5,000.00 a year was a sold, middle class income. A Jaguar sportscar was about $6,000 and a Rolls was about $25,000.
Even if you spend the money to get a First Class airline ticket, you know that there are plenty of private planes out there.
Harlan Ellison wrote an essay about ‘fuck you money,’ the amount he needed to have in the bank so he could tell the studios to fuck off. Back in the day he could go six months on $1,000.
1000 dollars in 1960 would be about 11 grand today.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know if I’d last 6 months on 11 grand. Maybe 3 or 4. Rent alone would nuke over half of that, and I live in a cheap ass place.
Think of it this way. $1 million in 1960 would buy you a couple of mansions, a fleet of nice cars, and you’d have enough left to put into investments that would give you income for life.
$11 million today won’t buy the nicest house on the block.
It’s more that Official Inflation is a lie and has been a lie for decades, and always in the direction of understating realiy.
Hence why two money values at different points in time which according to the Official Inflation are equivalent (i.e. one when inflation adjusted using the Official Inflation over the years in between results on the other) have very different purchasing powers, the longer the time distance between them the worst.
It actually makes total sense for politicians to do whatever it takes for Inflation to be understated:
Directly because too much Inflation is seen as a bad thing, so if the official number is lower, it looks better.
Indirectly because Official Inflation affects the Official GDP - GDP calculation first yields a number in today’s money (the Nominal GDP) which then gets “deflated” by Official Inflation (so, the higher the inflation the smaller it gets) to produce the Official GDP figure (i.e. the Real GDP), so if from one year to the next the Official Inflation understates reality, the difference ends up making the GDP look bigger due to the mathematics of its calculation, which appears as GDP “Growth”, something that in the Neoliberal era politicials harp about like crazy (“The Economy grew X% under our government/presidency”)
We are being lied to and have been lied to for a long time about the Economic “success” in our Western countries, which is part of the reason why most people keep feeling poorer all the while politicians keep telling us GDP is growing (the other reasons being the increase in Inequality and, to a lesser extent, some of the actual growth was just population growth and per-capita there was no or negative growth).
Also, the inflation for luxuries leaves regular inflation in the dust.
Back around 1960, $5,000.00 a year was a sold, middle class income. A Jaguar sportscar was about $6,000 and a Rolls was about $25,000.
Even if you spend the money to get a First Class airline ticket, you know that there are plenty of private planes out there.
Harlan Ellison wrote an essay about ‘fuck you money,’ the amount he needed to have in the bank so he could tell the studios to fuck off. Back in the day he could go six months on $1,000.
1000 dollars in 1960 would be about 11 grand today.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know if I’d last 6 months on 11 grand. Maybe 3 or 4. Rent alone would nuke over half of that, and I live in a cheap ass place.
We’ve been robbed
“Adjusted for inflation” is a lie.
Think of it this way. $1 million in 1960 would buy you a couple of mansions, a fleet of nice cars, and you’d have enough left to put into investments that would give you income for life.
$11 million today won’t buy the nicest house on the block.
It’s more that Official Inflation is a lie and has been a lie for decades, and always in the direction of understating realiy.
Hence why two money values at different points in time which according to the Official Inflation are equivalent (i.e. one when inflation adjusted using the Official Inflation over the years in between results on the other) have very different purchasing powers, the longer the time distance between them the worst.
It actually makes total sense for politicians to do whatever it takes for Inflation to be understated:
We are being lied to and have been lied to for a long time about the Economic “success” in our Western countries, which is part of the reason why most people keep feeling poorer all the while politicians keep telling us GDP is growing (the other reasons being the increase in Inequality and, to a lesser extent, some of the actual growth was just population growth and per-capita there was no or negative growth).
It will set you up for a life tho, let’s not play coy