Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/119

Rh naturally follows from advancing years and experience. Persons of this class generally had automobiles 10 years ago and have gained nothing in that respect or in other comforts. They find themselves now constrained to give up $1,600 per annum for federal income taxes and perhaps $400 for other taxes. Their expenses in every direction have risen anywhere from 50 to 100 per cent. Such a family formerly enjoyed the help of two or three servants. Many of them are now reduced to one or none at all. They see their houses falling into disrepair, through sheer inability to maintain them properly. Their ability to save has vanished. This class is in the lower range of what is graphically characterized as the “poor rich.” There is no doubt that it is not doing so well nor living so well as 10 years ago. However, this class also constitutes scarcely more than a handful of the total.

On the basis of the income tax payers of 1916 we may go down to the dividing line of incomes of $3,000 per annum in that year and find that there were not so many as 2 per cent of the people possessing incomes of that amount or more. In going down to that level we shall find the same impairment in the scale of living that we have observed on the way down from the top, but the lower we go the more acute is the adversity. In other words while a family with a $20,000 income was not so well off in scale of living in 1922 as in 1913, a family with a $3,000 income was in a situation relatively much worse.

If economic conditions were in the old equilibrium we should expect to discover such changes for the worse