By: David Deschesne

Editor/Publisher, Fort Fairfield Journal December 19, 2007, p. 3

With all of the mind-numbing government statistics, “adjust-for-inflation” numbers and Consumer Price Indexes, it can be very confusing at times to determine how much you are actually gaining with your labor compared to yesteryear.

One of the easiest ways to determine how long you have to work for products today, as opposed to your parents, is to convert the pricing into hours of labor needed to work.

In the right side bar, there is a list of products and quantities that an average family would buy on a weekly basis. The 1960 column illustrates prices at that time, and the total to purchase, as does the 2007 column.

What is shown here is that in 1960, one would have to work a little over 26 hours, at the $1.00 per hour Federal Minimum Wage, to acquire all of the products on that list in the quantities indicated. Today, in 2007, to acquire the exact same amount of products a person earning the Federal minimum wage will have to work nearly twice as long as in 1960!

Government “economists” sometimes state that while prices of products have risen, wages have, too. But, wages didn’t rise fast enough to compensate. If they had, the Federal minimum wage would have to be around $11.00 per hour in order for a person to work the same amount of time for those products as his counterpart did in 1960. Maine’s $7.00 per hour minimum wage is still a far cry from being on par with 1960’s prices.

There are many people today who do make $11.00 per hour or more; for those lucky enough to do so, they are doing about as well as a worker from the 1960s. However, there are many more people who make much less than that, which has forced families apart as both parents attempt to work to make up the difference.

One of the primary reasons for the shift in buying power is the type of money we convert our labor into.

In 1960, the dollar still had some ties to silver. Silver, as a tangible product, raises and lowers in value in proportion to most other products and services in the marketplace, so there are very few price fluctuations over time.

When the U.S. Congress opted to remove all silver from U.S. Currency - in violation of the U.S. Constitution - they set our society up to work longer, harder, more tiring hours just to obtain less than our parents did. The paper money we use today has no ties to products or services and the more banks print and loan into existence, the less it is literally worth.

The U.S. government does still mint $1.00 silver dollars, which convert for the familiar Federal Reserve’s paper notes at around 16:1.

If we were still paid in silver dollars, or their equivalent paper silver-backed certificates (for ease of portability) we would be able to get more for our labor, closer to the 1960’s side of the chart below, and experience little to no inflation

Price Comparison Chart

Assorted products and services that would be purchased on a weekly basis.