This is an amazing chart. (Click here for Pew Piece!)
Check out the contrast in how costs are soaring for things like education, childcare, vehicle maintenance, and food while crashing for electronic toys. You likely sort of knew this, but the chart (produced by the New York Times) is dramatic and clear.
Quoting from comments in the Pew piece:
The differences, though, show up in services — particularly the sort of services (education, health care, child care) that enable people to find and keep better-paying jobs and, over time, move themselves and their families up the socioeconomic ladder.
“Without a doubt, the poor are far better off than they were at the dawn of the War on Poverty,” James Ziliak, director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research, said in the Times story. But relative to middle- and upper-income Americans, he added, “they have also drifted further away.”
