Happy birthday, America! Honestly, you don’t look a day over 200.
I can say that with authority because I was fully sentient in 1976, a high school sophomore with too much hair, working part-time at an ice cream parlor for the federally mandated minimum wage of $2.30 an hour.
The bicentennial world was pretty different. No internet, no personal computers. Cars were cooler, but less safe. Vinyl still ruled. So did network TV. Phones were attached to the wall.
(This is where you roll your eyes and say, “Yes, we know, Grandpa.”)
And besides, “bicentennial” is much easier to say and remember than “semiquincentennial.”
But in some ways, things were kinda the same. Inflation was running hot. A major conflict with Iran was on the horizon. Politics were weird — but weird in a different way.
And how about money?
That $2.30 an hour I made at Swensen’s Ice Cream Factory? Equivalent to about $13 today.
The federal minimum wage hasn’t kept up with inflation, though, and sits at only $7.25. To compensate, many states and localities set their own minimum wages above the federal benchmark.
Median household income, on the other hand, is actually higher than it was 50 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.
Food is cheaper now, at least as a percentage of take-home pay. We have all kinds of cool gadgets we didn’t have before, whether you really want them or not.
But prices in some major categories of financial life have risen much faster than the overall rate of inflation — categories like healthcare and housing. My parents bought our Anaheim tract home in 1975 for about $50,000. Its Zillow estimate today is over $1.3 million. Healthcare expenditures have just about doubled after adjusting for inflation.
A college education? Don’t even ask.
So happy semiquincentennial, everyone. Let’s be clear: I owe everything I have to a decision my father made to leave Holland and bring his young family here. I was born a few years later into a life that has been marked by opportunity.
All I want for Independence Day is for the generations after mine to have the same opportunities.
This is an excerpt from the July 3 edition of MoneyNerd, NerdWallet’s free weekly newsletter. Subscribe here.
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