The authors do not say that more people are buying cars and houses, but argue that there is greater "housing consumption"...
See table 1 & 2. Housing consumption is measured in terms of square footage, number of rooms, fraction of homes owning a car, and other similar objective properties.
I didn't claim housing was "more affordable" (whatever that means), I claimed people have more of it.
Thaumaturgy's point was simple: rental costs have increased relative to wages and housing prices have increased relative to wages. It is no mystery why fewer young people are able to purchase real estate now than in the past. Or cars.
At worst your argument and sources conflate wages and income and standard of living in order to make insinuations that are statistically wrong. At best they can be interpreted as making the fairly non-controversial claim that the AGGREGATE standard of living in America has improved over the last 30 years, despite the fact that there has been a clear reduction in the relative purchasing power and affluence of younger Americans over the last 10 years.
If you have stats to back up your assertions, present them. So far all you've done is made ad-hominem attacks against the authors of my study and incorrect claims about it's contents.
Sources for health care and housing statistics are already listed above and I do not make a single ad-hominem attack on the authors. If you can point out where exactly you think I am misrepresenting their argument I will be happy to provide page references so they can disagree with you themselves.
To cite just one example as evidence that you need to read AEI "research" more carefully, you can find the authors mention the mid-1980s inclusion of mobile homes and trailer parks as new forms of "housing consumption" in the first paragraph on page 15. I give them some credit for mentioning this, since it should be obvious even to the uninformed that aggregate measures of "housing consumption" are going to go up when you find new forms of housing to count half-way through your survey.
As far as the reputation of the AEI goes, it stopped having any when it fired David Frum for being too far left [1]. Mainstream economists find the institute laughable [2], and even conservative economists like Bruce Bartlett mock its employees as "scholars" (his quotes) [3]. Poor quality ideological broadsides like the one cited above are the norm rather than the exception. Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" is broadly derided for racism, while Kevin Hassett and James Glassman are ridiculed in the mainstream media for backing pump-and-dump schemes like "Dow 36,000" and for seeming to be unaware of such basic economic concepts as discounted cash flow.
"The AEI is a laughingstock in economic circles..." <- Ad hominem. See also the third paragraph of your most recent post.
"You should also ask yourself why the authors go through such contortions to count things like rentals as purchases..." <- Misrepresentation. The authors attempt to measure consumption of housing, as does thaumaturgy. You are the only person discussing real estate investments.
"Their "income" figures are equally shoddy since they include government transfers through programs like food stamps as part of the "market income" of poorer people..." <- Misrepresentation. The authors explicitly distinguish between earned and unearned income.
To cite just one example as evidence that you need to read AEI "research" more carefully, you can find the authors mention the mid-1980s inclusion of mobile homes and trailer parks as new forms of "housing consumption" in the first paragraph on page 15. <- Misrepresentation. The "re-definition" was done by the government, not the AEI. It's also irrelevant, since I compared square footage in 2009 to 1989 (i.e., both stats are after the redefinition).
See table 1 & 2. Housing consumption is measured in terms of square footage, number of rooms, fraction of homes owning a car, and other similar objective properties.
I didn't claim housing was "more affordable" (whatever that means), I claimed people have more of it.