Found this site that lets you calculate relative purchase value between two years.
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.plUnfortunately this doesn't consider the amount of money we 'take home' after taxes. You can't just put in a salary from an early year and compare it to now since the percentage lost to taxes is much greater today. Likewise a much larger percent of income was spent on food a few decades ago and appliances were disproportionately more expensive. So comparisons are a bit uneven but interesting nonetheless.
