SFGate.com is reporting that a couple with two children living in San Francisco, CA cannot survive on $50,000 per year! In my mind this shows how the hidden tax of currency inflation - on top of all the other taxes - is destroying the buying power of the American Middle Class. When the Canadian dollar and American dollar are trading at a 1:1 ratio, that’s a sure sign our buying power shrunk enormously. But as dollars become worthless, an economy measured in dollars can seem to be “growing” when it’s really shrinking.
Maria Frias thinks of herself as middle class.
She works as an office manager for Bay Area Legal Aid, where she draws a salary of about $27,000 a year. Her husband, Ricardo, drives a laundry truck and takes in about $26,000.
But all they can afford is a $750-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood. They sleep in the same room as their daughters, Stephanie, 10, and Andrea, 6. They have no telephone. And Frias has to set aside about $400 a month to pay off a credit card balance that went into collection.
A family of four in the Bay Area with two working adults must earn $77,069, equaling an hourly wage of $18.53, just to pay for basic necessities, a study released today calculates. If only one adult works, that figure falls to $53,075, largely because the family doesn’t have to pay for child care, according to the report by the California Budget Project, a liberal Sacramento research group. But that one wage-earner must make $25.52 an hour.
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