Living Large and the Death of the Middle Class

There is an old SciFi story that I read back in high school that had as a subject cryogenics, freezing one's ass for a hundred or so years after depositing savings in the highest interest bearing account possible so you'd come back with compound interest ready for the future. So this guy wakes up from a five hundred year hibernation and finds......?

He quickly discovers that although he has a million dollars in his savings he can't begin to live. He doesn't have enough money. Why? Because there are at least five hundred new products and services "he needs" that didn't exist when he "died." Had he wanted to live at the level that existed when he hibernated he would have a ton of money. The stuff he used to have was being virtually given away. The new stuff included things like the now required continuing body scans so nobody got too sick, compulsory unlimited sexual gratification so the divorce rate had arrived at nearly zero, effortless learning through the use of hypnotism, a uniform economic growth due to computerization of goods and services, etc. etc. etc. Everybody had a boat, a couple of cars, a vacation spot, and so on. The rub here is that the prices all these "necessary" goods and services cost were deducted from your account, and you had to take these services. But the people who were in the current population knew how to deal with everything just fine. They had enough money because the time it took to earn enough for the goods and services was down to next to nothing.

In other words, there is a method wherein you establish the cost of something based on the number of hours (amount of time) you have to work to get it. It is this fact that isn't included in all the "studies" made by left wing Democrat and spouted by Lou Dobbs and the rest of the MSM. Here's a link for you....

So it would seem that if you look at the cost of things from the perspective of how much time you have to put in at work to purchase the things you want, it turns out that times are good.

Except, records and charts are no dam good if they don't start at the same point in time, and this one from so-called Reason Magazine doesn't do that. Interesting anyway and I'd like to see the study done correctly.
(link via Reynolds)