I figured out recently that my parent’s house, with 60 acres, cost 110% of Dad’s annual salary. My house, with .25 acre, in a VERY modest neighborhood, cost 180% of my annual income and I make twice what my father earned. I’d say things are getting worse, not better.
Also, I have double my salary in the past five years and still have only a couple hundred dollars at the end of each month- rather than thousands. Food prices are up, energy prices up, income stagnant, companies closing.. etc. etc.
I used the following to try to explain to some people why I don’t accept the blue sky routine about how much better off we all are.
I can show you two farms adjoining the one I grew up on along the Northern edge of South Carolina. Both these farms belong to people who were born on those farms in the 1940s. In both cases the families moved to North Carolina around 1950 and the fathers went to work as mill hands! In both cases, working as “low-paid” mill hands they supported their families, bought houses in North Carolina, went on annual family vacations and frequently returned to the family farms in South Carolina for weekends and holidays. In other words they KEPT the farms in South Carolina for second homes which they passed down to descendants, all the while buying homes and raising families in North Carolina on the pay of a mill hand! Please explain to me how someone could even attempt to do that now.
Note also that they did these things with no more than a PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION. Some of the descendants have also become very well off with only a public high school education, others were fortunate enough to attend college, all the children of both families would be considered middle to upper middle class now. I would really like to see someone try that now. You are more likely to see young people with college degrees looking for a part time job.
I could point to other families from the area who have similar stories, these two happened to live within walking distance of my family when I was a small child.