One Clear Dot

I’ve been giving a lot more thought lately to how much harder it gets for a typical middle-class family to get by financially as each year goes by. When I was a child in the early 70s, one income was absolutely enough for a family to buy a home and two cars and comfortably live, while still saving money for the future.

These days, two incomes has become par for the course and even then most families are in heavy debt so that they can own a home, cars, and keep some semblance of medical insurance.

Incomes have not risen as quickly as the cost of housing, gas, cars, utilities, clothing, medical, and education. Slowly, it has become close to impossible for people starting from scratch (like new college grads, young marrieds, and single-mothers coming out of divorces) to get to the point where they can afford to even buy a home.

There are several issues at hand here. One is the value of our salaries in the United States. If taxes, housing and consumer goods are going to stay at their current levels, incomes need to rise steeply across the board.

Second, the issue of our current Federal Reserve and the valuation of our money. Our money supply is falsely inflated and the transfer of wealth is not in favor of the typical citizen. I’m not the government, a bank, or a big business. Therefore, I am sucking on the dregs that the Federal Reserve spits out. When our country incurs national debt, I lose out. I have to deal with massive interest rates in order to pay for what we toss out of our collective coffers.

And, I suppose my mind is too boggled on this last issue to even give a sound opinion. Why do we, the United States, continue to give and loan money to foreign countries when we cannot even provide for our own legal citizens? We send food and aid to other nations, yet we have children in our own country with no health insurance and who go to bed hungry. We have adults who cannot afford medications and who skip putting gas int eh car so they can pay the electric bill. We have a system that does not employ enough people so we can actually check backgrounds and keep fraudulent people out of the welfare system.

My one desire in life is to see a day when my own daughter can be a middle class citizen living in general comfort.

Posted on October 21st, 2007 by onecleardot
Filed under: Life in the U.S.