I was a child and teenager in the 70s, the son of a working class family that did quite well on one blue-collar income.

We were not wealthy, but my dad was able to afford a mortgage on his salary, with money left over for summer vacations. Our neighborhood was filled with families in the same situation.

Working class people don’t live like that anymore. The idea that a family with three children could thrive on one paycheck — well, I’ll wait for the laughing to stop before I go on.

Ironically, my father politically opposed the labor unions and minimum wage whose halo effects kept his pay packet fat. He bought Ronald Reagan’s promises about trickle down economics.

He never paid the price personally, but his grandchildren are paying it today. All of them are now adults trying to start out in life, and not one of them can afford to buy a home, not even with their college educations.

And of course it goes without saying that none of them can afford to raise children without at least two incomes.

Sometimes I wonder if our biggest problem is that the boiled frog effect is obscuring our understanding of what we’ve lost.