Well … fuck, I just got done grabbing the BLS inflation calculation for .25 from 1973 and that’s $3.05 today but your post is just already here making me feel silly for even thinking about commenting.
Cool stats though, it’s interesting to see how the cost has more or less stayed in line with inflation. I think that’s what you’d expect to see with most commodities from that time to now, but I’m also an idiot who got like a C in my macroeconomics class so I don’t really know.
… if only the most expensive things stayed the same ratio - like mortgage/rent, health insurance, retirement, college. Minimum wage is $7.25, rent costs $1.5k. Got an A in macro, but only a B in micro. I wonder what happened…
Those things have gotten more expensive and I don’t want to sound like I’m arguing just want to say that’s always been a problem with calculating inflation. Like I read about Jesus being betrayed for six preices of silver or something and that far back it’s really hard to say how much that’s “worth” comparable to today.
But I never been to one of those fancy adult schools “snaps suspenders” so what do I know.
Chuck Grassley is 92 years old.
He was college age from 1951-ish to 1954-ish.
Gas prices were $0.27 to $0.29 a gallon back then.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-741-august-20-2012-historical-gasoline-prices-1929-2011
Adjusted for inflation, that’s $3.37 to $3.49 today…
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
Buuuuut… Another way of looking at it…
The minimum wage in the early 1950s was $0.75/hr.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
So a gallon of gas was between 36% and 39% of an hours worth of minimum wage work.
The current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. A gallon of gas at the current average of $2.847 is 39% of an hours worth of minimum wage work.
https://gasprices.aaa.com/
Well … fuck, I just got done grabbing the BLS inflation calculation for .25 from 1973 and that’s $3.05 today but your post is just already here making me feel silly for even thinking about commenting.
Cool stats though, it’s interesting to see how the cost has more or less stayed in line with inflation. I think that’s what you’d expect to see with most commodities from that time to now, but I’m also an idiot who got like a C in my macroeconomics class so I don’t really know.
… if only the most expensive things stayed the same ratio - like mortgage/rent, health insurance, retirement, college. Minimum wage is $7.25, rent costs $1.5k. Got an A in macro, but only a B in micro. I wonder what happened…
Yeah it’s wild how fucked our economy is.
The divorce of worker productivity from worker pay leading to the huge wealth gap we see today is really bad for everyone but the 1%.
Those things have gotten more expensive and I don’t want to sound like I’m arguing just want to say that’s always been a problem with calculating inflation. Like I read about Jesus being betrayed for six preices of silver or something and that far back it’s really hard to say how much that’s “worth” comparable to today.
But I never been to one of those fancy adult schools “snaps suspenders” so what do I know.
Actually kinda cool stats.