We are not here concerned primarily with that point nor with the average person “gainfully employed,” whose income is evidently not much above $2000, but we may glance a moment at the condition of the latter in order to get some standard of income measurement. In 1917 the street railway employees in Seattle submitted a minimum budget for living in a dispute with their company over wages. They figured that $1917.88 annually for a family of five would allow, among other things, $12 for the education of the children, $30 for reading matter of all kinds, and $120 each for insurance and old-age savings. The company was able to reduce this to $1505.60 by eliminating all reading matter, including newspapers, reducing education from $12 to $11, old-age savings from $120 to $100, and insurance from $120 to $30. Carfare was reduced to $35.70 annually, with the somewhat ironical result that the members of the families of the men engaged in running the street cars were allowed only enough to use a car themselves on an average of once every six days! As $5 a year per person was allowed for “recreation” and $4 for all “miscellaneous,” we need not linger over the average man in our total population who is “gainfully employed” when considering for the moment the high standard of living. We are here concerned with the persons[Pg 38] between those and the ultra wealthy—the persons who both suffer from and enjoy factors in that standard. One of the outstanding features of life to-day is its frightful and steadily increasing cost. Apart from taxation, it is much higher in the United States than in any of the other ten countries in which I have spent longer or shorter periods in the past few years. This is in part due to the intentionally prohibitive tariff, in part to the terrific increase in wages, and in part to the increase in the kind and number of things we are supposed to have in order to be happy.