are-americans-as-poor-as-they-feel: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance

Thanks, to my friend Kirk for passing this on….

Here is an excerpt from the article.  I encourage you to click the link to the full article…

The results show that the relative price of such necessities as groceries and fuel decreased over the past 30 years, while the price of big-ticket items, such as health care and education, more than doubled. Also, many households added expenses for media and technology, such as computers and Internet and cell phone service, which add up to more than $1,000 per person per year, on average, reported The New York Times.

One factor driving the shift in costs: productivity. Barry Bosworth, senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, says relative prices are down for such items as electronics, which have had rapid productivity gains over the decades.

Education has been one of the biggest contributors to spending increases. Since 1980 the average cost of college tuition and room and board more than doubled in real dollars (jumping nearly 500 percent in nominal dollars), to $20,435 in 2008 per year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The rise can be attributed to several factors, including declining state funding for public universities over the last decade, institutions’ failure to educate more students with fewer resources, and spending on new technology and such services as student counseling, says Sandy Baum, an independent policy analyst for the College Board and professor of economics at Skidmore College.

 

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