That is the title of a very interesting New York Times article which you can read here. It is by two economists who work at the Federal Reserve bank in Dallas. They show that the level of consumption between rich and poor in this country is not as big as the difference between income. The poor often have resources that the government does not count, like capital gains. Here is one really interesting quote:
"At the average wage, a VCR fell from 365 hours in 1972 to a mere two hours today. A cellphone dropped from 456 hours in 1984 to four hours. A personal computer, jazzed up with thousands of times the computing power of the 1984 I.B.M., declined from 435 hours to 25 hours. Even cars are taking a smaller toll on our bank accounts: in the past decade, the work-time price of a mid-size Ford sedan declined by 6 percent."
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