Today’s Washington Post, in an article about Mayor Bloomberg’s new poverty measure, says,
But Bloomberg’s aides said that while food accounted for a third of household spending in the 1960s, food now accounts for only an eighth of spending, with housing and transportation taking a larger slice of income. The new measurement, put together by New York’s Center for Economic Opportunity, takes into account a household’s spending on food, clothing, shelter, transportation, utilities and out-of-pocket medical expenses.
This is interesting. There has been so much ink spilled recently about food prices rising, so it’s a bit jarring to read that they have actually dropped as a percentage of household income by nearly 20 percentage points.
If I had to guess, my hunch would be that all other household expenditures–rent, energy, gas, health care, etc, have been rising pretty steadily through the years, while food prices have just undergone a rapid increase, leading to a similar rapid increase in alarming newspaper articles
