It's natural, but probably not healthy, to compare one's financial success with that of one's neighbors. Money's a funny thing that way. But something rings false about
Clare Briggs's newspaper comic strip It Happens in the Best Regulated Families for January 27, 1926, and not just the ungainly title of the strip. The $1,500 a year salary increase that provides the premise for this whole episode seems excessive for the time. Surely some well-situated people received raises of that magnitude back in the Roaring Twenties but that must have been far from the norm, and far out of the experience of the average newspaper reader. Increases in annual compensation of that magnitude are more credible today a century later.
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