Doing the Math - Does the present generation have it harder than before?

 

Tropes like this are repeated often online.  But do they make sense?

In my lifetime, the population of the United States has gone from 170 million people, to nearly 350 million, an increase of over 100%.   Meanwhile, the amount of real estate and resources have remained largely finite.  Waterfront property, for example, once common for the working man, is now a carefully rationed commodity for only the very wealthy.  Our condos in Pompano Beach, were originally built for the middle-class retired auto worker.  Today, middle class people end up moving to the landlocked western edge of the County, where they can have pretend mansions, but no water access.  Meanwhile, on the Intracoastal, real mansions spring up for the very lucky few.

But is the deck stacked against the newer generations?  Given the population boom, it is no wonder that things are more costly, scarce, and crowded.  It is not your imagination - driving was a lot easier back in the heyday of the Interstates, when brand-new pot-hole free roads were largely vacant, and you could rev up your Turnpike Cruiser to 110 MPH with little or no traffic to contend with.  Today, we fight for a lane change or a parking space.  We are a more crowded nation.

However....

The above trope has appeared like clockwork on Reddit every few days for the last few months.  Is it really true or not?  Are people really paying $7 a dozen for eggs?  According to some sites, Americans are paying $3.59 on average and maybe $5 or more for "organic" eggs at Walmart.  Sure, during the egg shortage, prices shot up - which tells me two things.  First, this is an old "meme" recycled from a few years ago.  Second, the people posting this are likely overseas, trying to stir up discontent (or generate rage bait and engagement) and have no idea how much eggs cost in the USA.

In 1987, the year I moved to Washington at age 27, eggs cost less than a dollar a dozen - about 78 cents, according to some sources.  That would be worth about $2.25 today, so yet, eggs are more expensive than before, in real terms, but not $7 a dozen expensive, rather half that.

Rent is another issue.  I noted in an earlier posting that I paid $900 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Hunting Towers, back in 1987.  The apartment building is still there and today, now called the Bridgeyard Apartments.  The apartment, on their site listed as "The Duke" rents for $2100 a month. Such an outrage!  But $900 in 1987 is worth $2612 today, so if anything, rents have gone down in the last 39 years.

But what about crippling student loan debt?  Surely the earlier generations didn't have to deal with that!  Well, I graduated from law school in 1992 after 14 years of part-time, full-time, and night school, with tuition reimbursement from my employers (partial!) and some help from my parents, as well as money I paid with my salary.  Even then, I graduated with $38,000 in student loan debt - and much of it was unnecessary, if only I learned to live on less.  We lived large on student loans - and kids still do today.  Luxury student housing is (or was) one of the largest growth areas in rental construction.

$38,000 in 1992 is worth about $89,500 today - far more than the fifty grand postulated in the meme above.  Yet, I was able to pay it all back, mostly because I refused the kind offers to refinance over 30 years at astronomical interest rates.  Yea, it was a pain in the ass, but I paid it off.  And in retrospect, it wasn't a lot of money, given that after a decade or two, I spent more than that on cars or boats or whatever.

And yea, cars are more expensive today - in real terms - than in the past. My Mother's 1973 Vega was advertised at a starting price of $1999 - about $15,000 today.  Today, the cheapest car you can buy brand new, is a Nissan Versa for about twenty grand.  But unlike eggs, a lot has changed in cars over the years.  Things like airbags, disc brakes, air conditioning, four-speaker stereos, etc, were either just not available or expensive options that few could afford.  Today, they are standard equipment.  A cars today last far longer than the 65,000 miles we got out of that Vega before the engine seized and the fenders rusted through.

A good used car today costs less, in real terms, than that Vega ever did, and is a far better value as well - lasting longer and providing more standard equipment.  Comparing technology and prices today with the past is always problematic.  Yes, Internet service sucked back in the 1960's.  Yes, I am being sarcastic.

But the point is valid.  We paid $35 for a "land line" back in the day.  Today, I pay $65 a month for a smart phone with 75GB of streaming data.  It actually costs less than the landline phone of yesteryear and does so much more.  The world hasn't entirely gone to pot..

But prices are only half the equation, right?  Wages haven't kept up with inflation!  And this may be a salient point, particularly in the last few years, as low-wage jobs in particular, fall behind.  In 1987, I started out as as GS-7-1225 Patent Examiner for the princely sum of $22,500.  While a boost from the $17,000 I was making as a lab tech at Carrier, it was a struggle to get by in the big city.  Sharing a place with my life mate was a big start.

Today, starting salary for a Patent Examiner can range from $57,000 to $65,000, which is on par with what today's value of my 1987 salary would be (about $65K).  So wages have kept up, at least in some fields.

This is not to say things are Even-Steven, or that Gen-Z is coming out ahead.  Far from it - they have inherited a far more crowded world than the one I lived in.  I recounted before how,  when my boomer elders graduated from college, they migrated to the "Sun Belt" which was largely unpopulated until the popularizing of air conditioning.  When I was born, most of America was crowded into the Northeast, and also on the West Coast.  Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and Florida were just not nearly as populated as they are today.  Heck, Florida was mostly part-time snowbirds - many houses simply didn't have air conditioning as no one lived in them during the summer months.  A lot has changed over time.

Of course, there isn't much left in the way of "undiscovered country" in the USA, except perhaps Detroit - or maybe the rust belt will have a revival (it seems to be happening, believe it or not!).  No, things are not the same as before.  But neither are they as dire as the meme above implies.

Then again, I guess some guy running a Pakistani bot farm wouldn't know that.

Deducting Medical Expenses

When I was younger, I never thought about deducting medical expenses, as I didn't have any.  But now...

NOTE:  Consult your tax advisor for current tax law in your jurisdiction.  Your mileage may vary.

Mr.See has always had problems with teeth.  Mine are strong, but not particularly attractive.  But as I asked my Dentist, "Will they last another 20 years or so?" and he replied, "Yes, of course!"  I said, "Good, that's all I will need them for!"

Mark on the other hand, has had to go through several painful root canals, and when our old Dentist's newly minted Dentist son - fresh from dental school - offered to do them yet again, Mark said, "Let's GTFO!"

We found a new Dentist who referred us to a specialist (Endodontist) who in turn referred Mark to an oral surgeon.  Turns out, it is far easier to simply replace a tooth than to go through three root canals.  And the overall cost is competitive.  Three root canals > One tooth replacement.

Still,  you are looking at $5000 and up, per tooth, and Mark has three bad ones.  Medical expenses, including dental, are deductible to the extent they exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income.  For 2025, our income was high, because of the condo sale.  But for 2026, it will go down again.

That being said, our total medical expenses for 2025 do exceed 7.5% of AGI, when you factor in all the expenses.

We had to go to the Mayo clinic several times for early morning appointments, necessitating an overnight stay.  At 87 miles one-way, auto expenses are reimbursed at a special medical rate of 21 cents per mile.  It adds up, and once you are over that 7,5% hurdle, you might want to think about all the things you spend money on that fall under "medical" including insurance premiums.  Co-pays, prescription costs - it all adds up!

I calculated our total medical expenses for 2025 included:

MAS Expenses:  $7552.14

RPB Expenses:  $3936.92

Lodging:            $ 584.09

Mileage:             $  301.14

Premiums:          $4214.50

TOTAL:          $16,588.79

Ouch.  Didn't see that coming!  So many Seniors claim they "never get a bill!" with Medicare, but they pay monthly for a supplemental plan plus a drug plan, plus co-pays on drugs and doctor's visits and treatments (in some cases).  And getting dental covered is problematic - you can pay a LOT in premiums, and end up with only 50% coverage - at a dentist not of your choice.  And no doubt, the insurance company would say, "do another root canal!"  Bastards!

American medical billing!  Swell ain't it?  At least we don't have socialism! I can buy a go-fast boat with the money I save by letting others die in the street!  Survival of the fittest, baby!  Yee-Haw!  /s

This exercise illustrates why logging your expenses is important for tax purposes.  Quickbooks made generating these reports easy.   ClearCheckbook can log purchases and generate reports, but only if you pay $5 a month (discount for yearly payment) for the deluxe web package.  As I use the program more, I start to like it more.   The only sticking point is online storage.  We'll see.

CAVEAT:  Medical expenses are apparently only deductible if you itemize!  Again, consult your tax specialist for more details.  So the whole exercise may be for naught.  Schedule 1-A this year has some interesting gimmies - interest deduction for new car loans (through 2028), deduction for overtime pay, no tax on tips, and a special deduction for seniors (The Big Bad Bill).  How will Trump pay for his war?  Oh, right, by cutting medicare!  Oh shit.  Goodbye Mayo!

By the way, this year we are filing a 1040-SR - the tax return for Senior Citizens!

Gummies

Gummies are the next big thing, but are they really a good thing?

As you get older, you take a lot more pills, some prescription and some are supplements. Vitamins and such, for example.

The prices aren't cheap, at least at the retail store. Oftentimes, a small bottle of vitamins or supplements can cost $20 or more. If you shop online, you can find the cost a lot less, particularly if you buy in bulk.

Prices are all over the board, however. Some retailers are selling a small bottle of 100 vitamins for more than another retailer is selling a bottle of 500, with the same dosage and chemical content. You really have to look at the cost per pill when comparing these things. In most cases, Amazon shows this value, in other cases you have to get out your calculator.

But one thing is clear, vitamins and supplements presented as gummies are usually 5 to 10 times as expensive as pills. I'm not sure why we want our vitamins and other pills to be treated like candy. Not only is it far more costly, it seems to me to be rather dangerous.

For example, I acquired from a friend of mine a large bottle of vitamin C gummies. I also got a large bottle of vitamin C pills which has a lot more servings for a lot less money. But what concerns me is that the vitamin C gummies taste like and look like candy, down to the sugar crystals dotting the outsides.  A child could easily confuse these with actual candy and would be tempted to eat the entire bottle. I'm not sure what the results would be other than a lifelong immunization from scurvy.

It just strikes me as odd that we put child-proof caps on everything these days, even things that you don't think a child would want to consume. I have a child-proof cap on my mouthwash, but nobody at their right mind wants to drink  mouthwash. I'm sure a child trying to drink it would spit it out shortly.

But pills? We make them intentionally enticing by making them look like and taste like candy. It makes no sense to me.

Marijuana gummies - which is what most people think of, when you say, "Gummies" in the first place - merely compounds the problem.  Little Suzie goes to visit Hippie Grandma and ends up passed out on the floor after eating a whole box full.  Since it takes nearly an hour for the effects to be felt, it isn't hard for a child to wolf down a handful without feeling initial effects.  As an adult, even a whole one of these makes me fall asleep, or more precisely, pass out.  I can't imagine what a handful would do to a kid.  Why aren't these provided as pills?  Why are they not in childproof packages? (Many times they are not!).

I recently ordered some multivitamins for "Men over 50," and the cost per bill was about 4 cents each. The same multivitamin in gummy form was 15 cents each, and some places wanted as much as 29 cents apiece. I'm not sure paying several times the cost of something in order to have it as candy is really a cost-effective thing.

Of course, many question the efficacy of many of these vitamins and supplements. Many nutritionists point out that if you have a balanced diet you probably don't need a multivitamin. And in some cases vitamins and supplements can actually be harmful to you. The vitamin supplement industry is a little shady to say the least.

Making these things look like candy it's just icing on the cake, so to speak.

Non Compos Mentis

I had to cheat on my cognitive test!

Another trip to Mayo, and I am not sure any of it is useful.  To recap, after spending over $100,000 of your taxpayer money, they found my organs are all in remarkably healthy condition - except my brain.  And there is nothing they can do about that, other than to prescribe medication.  So here we are.

They wanted to do cognitive testing, which took three hours to complete.  It is far more difficult than the "Montreal Protocol" shown above (which I sent to Mr. See during a break, as a joke).  They give you a string of numbers - like seven of them - and you have to read them back, in reverse.  I didn't think I would do well at that, but the trick for me was to read back the numbers first in original order, quickly (like it was one word) and then reverse the order.

I did well with arranging the bi-colored blocks into patterns, which sounds like child's play (and it was at first) but when they keep adding blocks and putting the pattern on the diagonal, it does get tricky.  I can see some "normal" people struggling with this.

But the interesting part was word listing.  "Give me all the words you can think of starting with the letter F, you have one minute!"  My mind went blank - possibly because it reminded me of the scene from Sense and Sensibility where they try to guess the name of Elinor's new boyfriend:

"His name begins with F. F? A promising letter. Foster? Forrest? Fotheringay? Featherty? - Fortescue? - Fondant?"

I sort of stalled after that.

The point of the test is to establish a starting point to measure my mental decline.  They can re-test a year or two from now and chart where I am falling behind.  Again, the purpose of this is somewhat ambiguous to me - I already know how far I have fallen.  What's the point of drawing a graph?

All that being said, I have no doubt I did better on the test than Trump did!

New Scam: The "VIN Report" Scam

When someone demands you go to an unknown site, beware!

I got a late-night text from an Oregon phone number asking if the trailer we are selling is "still available."   They wanted to see it tomorrow - all the way from Oregon!  Two red flags right there.  The "Is the item still available?" is the other red flag.  The "item"?  ESL!

Anyway, I played along and the guy wanted something like the "AVR" report and gave a link to an unknown website that purportedly generates CarFax-like reports.  I did not click on it.  I searched online and (after bypassing Google AI) found several sites discussing the scam.  Google AI helpfully chimed on, saying the site link was trustworthy!  Google AI sucks.

Don't click on such links.  The "VIN Report" site is fake and they want $25 for a "VIN Report" and for some reason, the buyer will only accept this one type of report.  They basically steal your credit card number and whatever other information they can get.

Buying and selling a car or other big-ticket item by yourself can be stressful.  Con artists play on your fear (that it will never sell, because you overpriced it!) or your greed (that you are going to make a lot of money selling it to a guy who immediately agrees to pay asking price, sight unseen).  Or people think they are going to buy something for 1/10th its value.  So people fall for these traps.

It sounds like a lot of work to steal credit card numbers, but since the texts are automated, it isn't hard to set the hook initially, and the scammers are working dozens of cons at one time, and if one plays out, so much the better.

Of course, the big red flag for me is that, generally speaking, trailers don't have VIN reports, and indeed, Craigslist and eBay both point out that the VIN number has no data associated with it.  A Canadian VIN number, registered in the US, doubly so.  So when these Bozos contact me asking for a "VIN report" on a travel trailer, well, the game is up before they start.

Got another one this AM - again from Oregon (why?) wanting to see the trailer tomorrow.  When I asked them where they were located, they replied, "Jekyll Island)" including the half-parentheses they cut and pasted from the CL listing. Nice Try, I replied.

It is all part of the enshittification of the Internet.  Since it is a worldwide web and still largely anonymous, it is easy for those overseas (or even domestically) to start scams, often automated, with a yield rate of 1-2% at best.  But since you can send out texts to millions of people, the returns can be substantial.

Craigslist is pretty dead these days.  Around here, it is mostly rednecks selling broken trash. "Two rotted fenceposts - $20"  I kid you not.  I listed some items there (bike rack, roof rack, Yakima stuff) and got NO responses.  I tried Facebook Marketplace by re-enacting my old account (closed ages ago) and they let me put up ONE ad.  Then they suspended the account, I guess because it had been deleted previously.  They wanted an image of my driver's license, which I had sent before, and then a VIDEO of my face (so they can do a deepfake of me?) to restore the account.  I took a pass.

I listed the trailer on fiberglassrv.com and the Escape Trailer forum (both owned by the same online entity, I discovered).  But it is like advertising your BMW on a BMW forum.  Everybody on there already has one!  We paid $30,000 for the trailer, new (seven years ago), and people had theirs listed on the enthusiast sites for $40,000 to $50,000!  I mean, yea, inflation, but really?  You price yours realistically and you get shouted down because you are "destroying the resale value of their trailer!"

We ran into the same thing with my friend's C5 Corvette - the car no one buys, sells, or drives.  "It's worth more than that!  I'm not just giving it away!"  Your kids will, though.

The trailer is on eBay with a "buy it now" price of $30K and a starting bid of $15K and two bids so far.  I want  it sold, not sitting on my lawn while I mow around it for several seasons, like they do in Central New York.

This is not entirely by chance, either.  The car pricing guides (KBB, Edmunds, NADA, etc.) have changed or been sold and are now hard to use.  You go online to see what your car is worth and are bombarded with ads to sell you a new car.  Resale data is hard to find, if you can find it at all. And with all the scams and hassles of selling private party, companies like CARMAX and CARVANA make it sound appealing to just use their services instead.

Car dealers hate private party sales and no doubt would outlaw them if they could.  They kind of sorta already have.