Life is harder now, experts say - Gut_Check - MSNBC.com

Life is harder now, experts say - Gut_Check - MSNBC.com:

Bankruptcy law expert and Harvard University Professor Elizabeth Warren spent a lot of time crunching consumer spending numbers for her popular books, 'The Fragile Middle Class” and “The Two-Income Trap.” In both, she makes this point: Despite all those $200 sneakers you hear about and the long lines at Starbucks, consumers are actually spending less of their income — much less — on discretionary items like clothing, entertainment and food than their parents did. In fact, after taking care of essentials like housing and health care, today’s middle class has about half as much spending money as their parents did in the early 1970s, Warren says.

The basics, according to Warren, now take up close to three-fourths of every family's spending power (it was about 50 percent in 1973), leaving precious little left over at the end of the month — and leaving many families with no cushion in case of a job loss or health crisis.

Note: Fantastic table in this article, marked "Generational shift - Comparing budgets for two typical, four-member families". It shows the information for two fictional families, "Tom and Susan," single-income family, mid-1970s (adjusted to 2004 dollars), and "Kimberly and Justin," dual-income family, 2004.