The Wages of Sin

I'm getting a little burnt out on politics, which I suppose is a problem when we've only just begun the madness of the 2016 election.  I suppose what I'm about to talk about could be seen as political, but it really shouldn't be.  In fact, the politicization of this issue has made it seem contentious and intractable, when in fact it should be common sense.  What I'm talking about here is wages, what we get paid for the work that we do.
It is an economic reality that money, ever since we came off the gold standard, is a commodity whose value is highly relative.  For instance, every old guy you talk to will tell you how when he was a teenager his first job paid him like $0.25 an hour or some other small number that sounds absurd to us who are used to thinking in terms of a quarter as a nearly disposable slab of metal that won't even buy a candy bar.  However, think about the fact that in the 1950s you could purchase a brand new Chevrolet or Ford sedan for less than $2000, and the average yearly income was somewhere between $3000 and $4000.  People who bought homes in the 1960's in suburban areas near large cities in the east could expect to pay around $30,000, no I didn't leave off a zero.  By 1970, average wages, and I emphasize average, had nearly doubled, and of course the cost of things tended to go with them.  However, as this research indicates real wages, that is wages adjusted for inflation, have been shamefully stagnant.
I'm above my pay grade with the math of what has happened in the past forty years, but let's just say there have been changes in the culture that have made what we experience as the cost of living even more difficult to manage on "average wages."  There are things we "need" to pay for that a 1950's family was blissfully unaware of, for instance: cable, internet, cell phone and for most of us a second family car, not to mention the skyrocketing cost of insurance and healthcare that would probably make 1950's financial planners soil themselves.  And before you say that cell phones and internet access are luxuries, please attempt to do without them for a month and then tell me about how "frivolous" those expenses are.
I want to get past the economic stuff though and talk about the philosophical and spiritual consequences that the current situation has to our culture.  I read a bit, and in my reading I notice something about characters in books from the past.  Apparently it used to be sort of a given that you could "make a living," if you just buckled down and worked hard. I'm not just talking about feeding, clothing and housing yourself and/or your family.  A living could be made as a grocery clerk, a farmer, a tradesman, a mechanic or a janitor. You could always "climb the ladder" into management and executive positions, you could put in overtime and show ingenuity and initiative to "get ahead," but there was a certain baseline standard of living that was expected.  Blue collar jobs were not despised and the wages paid for said jobs were not an introit to the welfare line.
Women were not generally expected to work outside the home (yes, I know not all of them liked that idea, we can deal with gender equality some other time), and a single full time paycheck was enough for a couple or a small family to "get by."  Success meant doing better than just getting by, but failure usually meant just falling back to the basics, not catastrophic.
I will use my own personal case as an example.  We moved into the Washington D.C. metro area and we bought a house.  My salary at the church is sufficient to cover the basic expenses of life for a family of four, but it would be a pinch, not because I'm paid poorly, but because the cost of living in this area is high.  My current salary in rural Pennsylvania, our previous location, would be a monkey with an entirely different suit. What is wrong with this picture?  Well not that much at the moment, Michele works, and we "get by" but let's say something happened to one of us, and one income went away.  Let's say that one of us wanted to make some sort of change, get more education or try a different career path, sorry charlie, that's going to create too much insecurity.  We become addicted and enslaved to the status quo.
The consequence of this is a feeling like you're walking across a room with no floor, as long as you step on the rafters and keep your balance everything is fine, but you are terribly risk averse.  You do not tend to innovate or take chances on doing something remarkable.
It's fine once you get into a comfortable place like we are, but it is not, I think, ideal for the young, or for the people who might really drive us forward in the future.  The American Dream of growing and prospering more and more has vanished under our noses.  External costs and mistakes of the past are coming back to haunt us, and I think that has a chilling effect on the whole culture.
This is why I think the serious work of establishing a real living wage standard across this nation is vital, and should be a priority of Republican and Democrat alike.  Those who can and do work at full capacity should not have to worry about being able to make rent or put food on the table.  A government that does not provide for that reality is failing in the modern world.  I guess I agree with Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) and Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) in their visions for a society that provides a safety net, and maybe even better, a nice solid floor to stand on.