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My experience says different. The 5-10 year engineers working around me are considerably less than I was 20 years ago, in real terms. They may make $50K now, I was hired at $30K in 1979 with about 5 years experience. My house on one acre was 2.5 times my salary. You cannot touch anything like it for $125k these days. My brother in law bought a brand new souped up Camero in 1966 for approximately $3000. I owned a few used cars in that period, most cost less than $500. In '67 I bought a 10 year old BelAire for $200 - worked fine. In '71 I bought a 5 year old Malibu convertible for $500. In '72 electric bills were $30, for 3 months worth of electricity (they billed quarterly then). Phone bills were exorbitant, since Bell was still a monopoly.

My father was an engineer, raised seven children on his salary (my mother did not work); he bought a new car every 4 or 5 years, a sailboat, nice house, and after 30 years a comfortable retirement. Can you imagine the costs of raising seven children? I raised two, and know they aren't cheap. In the past 15 years I've only had two new cars. Good ones, a 91 Maxima, and a 91 Corolla (for wife). I've saved a reasonable sum for retirement, and vested in pension, but except for an unexpected windfall, my retirement would have me scrimping.

My manager thinks very highly of me, I'm very high on retention totem, usually get above "merit" pool raises. The project managers that I work for seek me out and are very happy with my work. My skills, productivity and ability to perform have grown tremendously over the past 20 years, but my pay has not kept up with the cost of living, and my coworkers get much less in real pay than their peers did 20 years ago. Certainly middle level, white collar workers in the US are being reduced in economic status.