Web Letters: Inflation's Undertow

I could take valid positions both agreeing and opposing this article. While parts of it are quite on target, there are fields in which real income has risen spectacularly.

My basic $400 computer would have cost a half-million in 1960 dollars (maybe $5 million of today's), and does so much more than that machine could have done. VCR machines once cost $5,000 ($50,000 today), and were only available to a few. Mobile phones cost $15,000 ($150,000 today), and needed to be built into a car chassis.

One could go on and on. A very good case could be made that real personal income of ordinary people has increased to a level of about twenty-five times that of 1960. A true picture has to factor in both the negatives and the major advances.

Poor people today routinely buy many items that the very rich could not afford when I was a kid.

John D. Froelich

Upper Darby, PA