The prior issue of this series is found here.
In the prior issue to this series, it was discovered that having moved away from free market dynamics resulted in electricity prices that are too high (less affordable). The peak earning power in terms of kilowatt-hours of electricity was likely somewhere around 1968, when workers in manufacturing could afford to buy lots of electricity.
This issue deals with another bare necessity: housing. Here are the average and median prices of U.S. homes over time:
[click to enlarge]
To get perspective on the rise in the cost of housing, here is the the median price of homes in terms of the number of years of median family income required:
In the 1960s and 1970s, homes could be bought with less than 3 years of median family income. But by 2022, it required more than 4.5 years of median family income in order to purchase a median-priced home. The situation is even worse when looking at the average income for blue collar (non-supervisory) workers:
The average blue collar worker in 1964 could afford to buy an average-priced home with just 4 years of annual salary or wages. But by 2023, that same worker would have to work for 10 years in order to make the kind of money needed to buy an average-priced home. Homes are less affordable than they ever have been in the data set.
The evidence is suggestive of an elite cabal of power-mongers who have deliberately moved the USA away from free market mechanics and put the economy under more and more government control, so that they could extract wealth from the middle class. The middle class in the USA is currently being priced out of the housing market.
A sinister motive behind that phenomenon might be that greedy landlord types hope to turn all of America into a renter society — like in times of feudalism — where no one owns their own land and they instead have to live and work on the land of greedy landlords and the robber barons who plunder by use of the leverage of government.
Reference
U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Average Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States [ASPUS], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS
U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States [MSPUS], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Weekly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private [CES0500000030], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000030
U.S. Census Bureau, Median Family Income in the United States [MEFAINUSA646N], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA646N
Now do Canada!!! Insane here.