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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992                   TAG: 9201190228
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

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SPENDING BELIES HARD TIMES

The Census Bureau reports that after taking account of inflation, the median family in 1990 earned $35,353, about $2,000 more than in 1970.

Going back another decade, family incomes also are 23 percent higher than the average of the 1960s, belying the view that today's middle-class family cannot live as well as its middle-class parents.

Even though they save less and borrow more, today's families seem no more strapped than those of the 1960s and 1970s in how they spend their money.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics study shows that at the start of those decades, a family whose principal breadwinner was 35 to 44 years old spent about 20 percent of its income after taxes on housing and utilities.

In 1987 and 1988, a family of the same age spent considerably more - 26 percent. But partly because today's family has fewer children, spending for food and clothing dropped from 34 percent of its income 30 years ago to 19 percent. As a result, the family of the late 1980s spent considerably less on the necessities of food, clothing and shelter.

Because most middle-class families still have employer health insurance, their own spending for medical care, while rising lately, is only about 5 percent of their incomes.

For the money-strapped family, recreation would seem a likely target of cutbacks. But the family of the late 1980s spent more for recreation than the family of the 1960s. "In their spending," said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, "it doesn't look like people are suffering."

- The New York Times

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