I just had a thought remembering something

 about my dad and growing up. One night we discussed mortgages and I was overwhelmed to hear how much dad paid for the family manse back in '54.

Right now (before taxes) I could buy 6 of them and still have some chump change left over!

Waugh!!!

Back in '56 when I started first grade in Nona Bryant's class I would have a buck pinned into my shirt pocket and hand it to the teacher every Monday morning. It was my lunch money for the school lunch program and it fed me lunch for a week.

Right now I probably make four or five times what my dad did before he died in '82 and probably live in a comporable place in a somewhat comparable neighborhood, give or take.

It takes an awful lot of money these days to live on. On the way to work I coughed up almost four bucks for a cup of coffee and two doughnuts and I recall buying the same thing years ago and handing the girl a buck and getting back change. Even after a reasonable tip, I had a couple of dimes or a quarter left over.

Back in the day, two bucks would buy a guy a pretty good brain roasting on a Saturday night. A bottle of Boone's Farm was a buck, a quart of beer was about forty cents and a nip of halfway decent whiskey was half a buck. Two bucks would give you a pretty good night of raising hell with the boys and you'd even get change.

A few years later I would give one of my older friends a ten and he'd make a 'Packy run' and hand me a jug of scotch and a case of beer and I'd get a couple bucks back in change.

A few years later after I got out of the service I recall that a hundred bucks would buy a guy one hell of a weekend and likely you'd have enough left over for a pretty good breakfast on Monday morning.

In '69 I bought a '63 MGB for $200 and although that was one hell of a deal even then, when the MG blew its engine a while later I went through a string of cars, none of which cost me over fifty bucks.

All in all, things were a whole lot cheaper than.

On the other hand, so were wages. I used to bust my ass in high school at a boatyard for a buck an hour and later in a supermarket the wage wasn't much more than two bucks an hour.

I remember framing houses after I got out of the service for four bucks a hour and thinking that it was pretty good money.

Still, over the past twenty years things seem to have gotten completely crazy. When I look at my present pay scale I think I'm really doing well but then I look again at what things cost and figure that I'm really not getting ahead in that I am not likely to buy the big house on the hill of get myself a Ferrari anywhere in the near future.

I suppose that if I was making the money today back in the day I would be able to afford a Ferrari or maybe an airplane of some sort or maybe a big yacht.

I remember back in '69 one of my friends bought a pretty good sized boat that was the talk of the neighborhood and the price by todays standards was nothing. I vaguely remember five grand but I could be wrong. Still, it was cheap by today's standards. Dirt cheap.

The value of the dollar has spiraled down as the cost of things has spiraled up. It's incredible.

As I get older and look at the amount things cost it make me long for the days when finding an extra $5 actually meant something. Hell, if nothing else, back then a fin was good for 4 pitchers of draft beer. You could be the life of the party for that.

Last summer I gave the 10 year old $20 to pull weeds for me and although he did a pretty good job, at $5 an hour it struck me that it was a buck an hour I made framing houses for a guy when I got out of the army. I did manage to get a raise to $5 after a while but it feels wierd paying a 10 year old what I made in my 20s.

I often look back to the days when the dollar was strong and the way I see it, I would have no problem today working for 10% of what I make now if everything else would drop to 10% of what it is today.

Still, people would gripe because they want 'big wages' even though big wages mean big prices.

In "A Conecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" Mark Twain wrote a funny piece along these same lines about the way people think. It's true. People fool themselves when they want a raise because the things they buy generally go up in price either corrospondingly or even at a somewhat higher rate than their pay raise.

You wind up making more but being able to buy less. Where's the increase in the standard of living? It isn't there.

Then again, we are pretty much surrounded by people that do not know how to count. If you don't believe me, look at our elected government officials.




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