If you are living somewhere with 2k a month rent, then yes, $50k a year is awful and nigh unlivable.
You should not be in a position where you are working professionally and full time where you have to worry about having enough money each month to survive.
The cost of living is out of control and nobody wants to acknowledge that should reflect rising salaries. It is why there was so much momentum around a $15 minimum wage two years ago.
The economy has not stagnated or contracted. Markets are larger than ever. Corporations are profitable as always and are somehow finding billions to buy each other out rather than pay their employees a respectable wage.
If the momentum and progress of the 50s and 60s held to today the mean salary should be in the $150k a year range, not $50k. The average person is way too complacent to the march of inflation and growth of the economy to think that since $50k was a lot in 1978 that it should still be sufficient in 2018.
> The cost of living is out of control and nobody wants to acknowledge that should reflect rising salaries.
Alternatively, we could look into reducing cost of living. US is dealing with a legacy system in the form of suburban sprawl that makes housing far more expensive than it has to be because the demand by the biggest generation far outstrips supply (simply due to area constraints and ridiculous zoning policies).
A small dilapidated house built in the 1950s with lead paint and asbestos should not cost $400,000.
Unfortunately, that is politically untenable right out of the gate.
To be fair, in the 50s and 60s a lot of the jobs were more engineering than technical, and the US had the advantage of being one of the few nations whose industrial capacity wasn't damaged by World War II. Now, software developers of similar skills in the US and India are paid massively different rates, simply because of cost of living. All the "missed gains" the US has is because money is being funneled to other countries who are starting to produce wares (both soft and hard) that compete with what the US basically had a monopoly on.
You should not be in a position where you are working professionally and full time where you have to worry about having enough money each month to survive.
The cost of living is out of control and nobody wants to acknowledge that should reflect rising salaries. It is why there was so much momentum around a $15 minimum wage two years ago.
The economy has not stagnated or contracted. Markets are larger than ever. Corporations are profitable as always and are somehow finding billions to buy each other out rather than pay their employees a respectable wage.
If the momentum and progress of the 50s and 60s held to today the mean salary should be in the $150k a year range, not $50k. The average person is way too complacent to the march of inflation and growth of the economy to think that since $50k was a lot in 1978 that it should still be sufficient in 2018.