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It is so baffling to me beyond explanation that people are so willing to find a reason that we are suffering right now. Yet they refuse to admit that that reason is corporate greed. Like this person is saying that more people live alone now. And that could be the reason. Let's actually take a look at the numbers.
A lot of people assume that more people are living alone every single year, and it's just a steady process upward, but that's not the case. For instance, in 1950, about 9% of all households lived alone. And in 1940 7.7% of all households lived alone. But the thing is, it promptly went down after that.
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In the 1960s through the 1970s, we had a lower percentage of people living alone than we did in 1940. We didn't surpass the numbers of 1940 and 1950 until around 1980, and we can even pull it up to see if there's a correlation between the percentage of households who lived alone and the number of days on median wage it took to make one month's rent.
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And what we find is that there's no correlation there at all. In fact, the value of median wage peaks throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and at that point in history, more people were living alone then than at any point in the United States history. So, no, it's not living alone. That's the cause of this issue. But while we're on topic, let's go ahead and look at corporate profits and see what we find there. So here we have corporate profits per quarter, per capita. And this is listed by a year. For example, 2022 corporations made on average $8,858. And that's for each of us, not just from the workers, not just from the customers.
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That's from each person total. And that was on average for the quarter. And on this next spreadsheet right here, we have the median wages by year, and we have the median wages if they kept up with corporate profits every year.
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And that third column right there is the difference between the two. For instance, in 1960, the salaries on median wage were about 211% of what they otherwise would've been if adjusted for corporate profits, which means the median wage in 1960 was about double of what it could have been if it were the same as corporate profits in 1960.
But in 2022, the median wage is only 57% of what the median wage would be if corporate profits kept up. And let's compare that percent difference to a lot of different things like median wage and median rent. As you can see, it was much easier in the years in which median wage is worth more than it otherwise would've been if it was adjusted for corporate profits, specifically in 1985, when it was worth almost four times the amount that it otherwise would've been worth if it was adjusted to corporate profits.
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1985, it only took 1.6 work days to pay for one month's rent. It only took 37 work days to pay for a new car. It was much easier to buy a movie ticket. It was also much easier to buy gas. All in all, things were easier, and that's because they made a higher percent of corporate profits than every other year. But while in 1985, they were making almost four times as much when compared to corporate profits, today our median wage is only 57% of what it otherwise would be if it kept up with corporate profits. Living alone is not the reason this is happening. It's all corporate greed.