Not Your Father's Standard of Living

There are some days that I look at the standard of living I currently provide my family and compare it to that which my parents provided for me, and I scratch my head. My father was a research scientist and my mother was a registered nurse working part-time until I finished elementary school, and full-time afterwards, and I'm grateful that they were able to provide for a relatively comfortable life for me and my brother. We lived in a center hall colonial in a New York metropolitan suburb and somehow they also owned a number of rental properties on the side. They were shrewd in their investments and they were thrifty in their spending, all of which contributed to a financial health which enabled them to both fully fund me and my brother's overpriced college educations as well as my brother's further training to become a physician.

I think I have a pretty good handle of what my parents used to make and I know how much I make - and I can't get it around my head why they/we seemed better off than my family does. Even inflation adjusted and accounting for the fact that my wife is currently making less than my mother was as  part-time nurse, our income is much higher than my parents at their age given my salary significantly outpacing my dad's (side note: if you want to make a higher salary in the pharmaceutical industry, the business side is generally more lucrative than the research side. Right or wrong, it is what it is.) So given our greater income, why is it that:

• My parents had a bigger house
• My parents had an additional car
• My parents had cash on hand to fully fund our college and graduate school educations
• My parents are comfortably living in retirement

Look, I'm happy for them and it's not as if this is coming from a place of father-son competitiveness. I just don't understand the math. Part of it can be accounted for the extreme difference in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) (e.g. in 1986, it was 109.6, and in 2010 it was 224.9, which implies an almost the price of consumer products has approximately doubled in real terms), part of it has to do with inflated housing costs where we live.and part can be attributed to my wife and I giving more to church and charities. The interesting thing is that this phenomena is probably going to get worse. Much worse.

A recent opinion piece written by Matt Miller in the Washington Post argues that the government has been complicit in this growing tide of screwing the younger generation, most specifically those under 35 years of age. There are a couple of specific examples highlighted in the article around the differences in the cost of living from yesterday and tomorrow:

1) College Education
2) Infrastructure
3) Health Care / Social Security Entitlements

These three costs haven't hit my generation flush in the face yet, but it will. Ten year from now, I'll have to shell out an ungodly amount for college tuition, the cost increase of which has greatly outpaced the CPI, with increasingly less government (decreased Pell Grants, Stafford Loans and state universities which will no longer be such a great bargain) support. We'll have to, by necessity, start paying through the nose for crumbling infrastructure which can no longer be patched up. And since there seems to be no stomach to make hard decisions around these, we'll continue to fund an even larger hole caused by socialized healthcare and entitlement programs.

Or we can just kick the can down the road and pass the bill to our children. Hey, it's not like that hasn't been done before.