Workin' For a Livin'

OK, so at 45, I'm by no means old, unless you're one of those silly little whipper-snappers whose birthdate has as its third digit 7 or something larger and who cares what you punks think anyway. Ahem.

Anyway, I was born the year that this writer chose for comparison of worker earnings. He saw an item in a Radio Shack catalog from 1964 about a "moderately-priced" stereo, available for about $379. Sounds good, he says, until you realize the average, not minimum, but average hourly wage for an American worker was $2.50. The average worker would have had to rack up just more than 150 hours on the job to clear a pre-tax amount that would enable him or her to buy that moderately-priced stereo.

Let that same worker put in the same amount of hours today at the current hourly average of $19 and he or she's got enough to pick up a home theater system, a 50″ plasma HDTV, an Apple 8GB iPod Touch. a 3D Blu-ray disc playe. a 300-CD change, a portable GPS, a 14.1-Megapixel digital camera, a Dell Inspiron laptop computer and a TiVo high-definition digital video recorder for the three grand that gets pulled down before taxes. After taxes, of course, I think that average worker may have to settle for that moderately-priced $379 stereo.