| When I entered the workforce as a callow teen, in the summer of 1966, I received my first minimum wage paycheck of roughly fifty dollars as if it was gold-plated. Babysitting had only netted me .75 per hour, so $1.25 represented a huge raise for me.
A quick look at prices in that forgotten era tells me more about the actual value of that $1.25 wage.
A gallon of milk was .99. A gallon of gas was .32. First-class postage cost a nickel, and the average cost of a new house was around $15,000. A brand new car was in the $2,600. range.
1966 was also the year in which, under a federal mandate from the Johnson administration, the University of Wisconsin created its "Institute on Poverty Research." Just three years later a social conscience was not yet unfashionable, and childhood poverty rates reached their lowest level ever, when only 14% of children lived in poverty. That figure is now at roughly 22%.
In 1966, most qualified students could attend a public university for next to nothing, and even "Ivy League" privates charged only about $3,000. per year.
Just as today, we had an unpopular war in a strange foreign land; but we also were still a manufacturing powerhouse then, and upward mobility was an achievable goal. Our cup was at least half-full.
So what exactly does the new minimum wage for Vermont, at $8.46 per hour (the third highest in the land) puchase in 2012's economy?
It would buy you a lot more milk than it did in 1966, at an average price of $3.76 per gallon in 2011; but only a little more than two gallons of high-test as opposed to three in '66. Of course bizarre price-fixing schemes that profit everyone but the small, responsible farmer and the independent gas station account for the relatively low cost of food and fuel in today's economy.
The more substantial costs of living, like housing, education and transportation tell quite a different story. |
