I understood that supermarkets are always changing prices semirandomly, so that consumers never really know what the price "should" be.

Yes, because as I pointed out more people stay in college longer ( poor now but not for long), more people retire early due to good stock markets (simply read BLS/Census data).

Here's a simple way to check the rough argument: Suppose on avg it takes 5 years to post HS education. A working career is about 50 years. So 10% of a college student is spent poor with near certainty.

25% of people went in 1970. That accounts for (1/4)*(1/10) = 2.5% of the population being in poverty, yet they will mostly do quite well over a lifetime.

Now about 50% go to college. That's a 2.5% increase in the poverty rate, yet in reality people over a lifetime are going to be richer.

Do the same thing to retirees, to early retirement due to stock growth, early retirement from COVID where many people also decided to retire early since they could afford it, and your increase in the poor evaporates.

Also, US poverty rate puts one in the top 15% of world incomes, so our poverty rate is a pretty nice income. And poverty is measured pre-govt transfers, which provides a lot more income.

I just gave you the stats, and you can check them. Stop repeating things for which I pointed out solid and provably correct reasons your interpretation is wrong. If you want to refute there are more people in college, or that people aging into retirement or retiring early are not increasing then do so.

Simply do the math, or read Census or BLS data.

> the buying power has been stripped by

Inflation adjusted median wages has risen significantly [1]. So no, buying power has not been stripped. When you pick only a few items but ignore the overall purchasing power of an income you are making reasoning errors. This is also true of you break it down by decile or quintile - BLS/FRED/Census again has all the data you need. You continually cherry pick the extreme edges of things and ignore the actual data for the entire thing.

> much of the ability of families to move to UMC has been on the backs of two working parents

Individual income, as shown above, has greatly increased relative to inflation. The reason people use two incomes is they have more than twice as much stuff as 1970: median house sizes have more than doubled, more cars per family, more TVs, massively more entertainment expenses, more of everything. If a family wanted to live like 1970 then one income now is more than enough (provably so, since again, inflation adjusted wages since 1970 have increased significantly).

>In general, be wary of Newsweek articles

Nothing in that article is different than you can source yourself from the root data sources for all this knowledge: Census, BLS, FRED, and a few other stats gathering agencies. If you dispute the stats in the article, present your stats and sources. Stop pretending cherry picked anecdotes replaces analysis of the entire dataset.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

When famous economist Chetty et. al. [1] at the Harvard Equal Opportunity project went to prove this, they were surprised to find it's not true. They obtained never before access to lifetime IRS income statements to see how people moved over time, and they found that social mobility has not changed from around 1960 on. (Other studies had already shown this to be true for the first half of the 20th century). Other studies since theirs have obtain similar results. Here's a summary article about their results [2].

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C15&q=che...

[2] https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-harvard-study-us-social-mobilit...

Thanks for clarifying this.

How difficult is it to escape the lower class.