The other day I read an editorial/article talking about the good old days of the early 1960s, where the author reminisced about how the middle class family could make it easily on wages of $10 an hour. At that point, I lost all patience, because no one in what I’d call the middle class was making $10 an hour back then.

In 1962, the minimum wage was $1.15/hour, equivalent to roughly $10/hour today, but a $10 an hour wage back then meant an annual income of $20,000 – equivalent to an annual income of $168,000 today. That summer, after my first year of college, I’d managed to get a job as a lifeguard at a commercial pool that paid $1.75 an hour, equivalent to $15.00 an hour in today’s dollars, in order to earn money for the next year of college expenses, and I knew I had a great summer job. I also worked every extra hour I could get, because there were no benefits, and no limits on overtime and no additional pay for overtime. Federal overtime regulations were phased in during the mid-1960s

In 1962, the average factory worker made around $2.50 an hour ($22 in 2019 dollars) or about $5,000 annually, equivalent to $42,000 today, not including any benefits. Auto workers made more, on average somewhere over $3.00 an hour for an annual wage of $6,000 – $51,000 or more in today’s dollars. And they had generous benefits in addition.

By 1965, I was an ensign in the U.S. Navy, married and making about $5,800 a year with quarters and subsistence allowances on top of basic pay. We lived in a rented one bedroom apartment in Chula Vista, California, and had one car. We didn’t go into debt, but we certainly didn’t save anything, nor did we splurge on luxuries, and we certainly didn’t eat out much. Now… today, to get the purchasing power of that $5,800, you’d have to make $46,000, and a great many costs of living have gone up more than the inflation rate. We paid $110 a month in rent, equivalent to $900 now, but the cost of renting a one bedroom apartment in the San Diego area now averages just under $2,000 a month.

The reason why I’m “reminiscing” isn’t because the good old days were good or bad. As is the case now, times were good for some people and not so good for an even larger number. But I also wanted to point out to those who haven’t really thought about it that a dollar doesn’t go near as far as it used to, and my calculations understate that inflation, because the CPI has been tweaked so that it doesn’t reflect the full costs of inflation, particularly in the costs of housing, medicine, and higher education… and too many older people who point out how little they made tend to forget just how much more one of those old-time dollars bought.