The $79 Trillion Heist

[Celerity]

We’re in an affordability crisis because workers aren’t being paid at the same levels they earned in the past.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/03/79-trillion-heist-worker-pay/



There are, of course, two components to affordability: sellers’ prices and buyers’ incomes. For most American families, buying (or renting) focuses either heavily or entirely on life’s essentials: housing, food, transportation, education, health care, and other forms of care (child, senior). That a clear majority of American families are, at minimum, stressed by these costs is a consequence of not just a host of factors on the sellers’ side, but of one big factor on the buyers’ side: a half-century of wage stagnation, even as investment income has soared. Or, if you prefer, a half-century of buyers’ income stagnation, even as sellers’ income has soared.

If you depend on investments for most of your income, this is a pretty damn good time. The University of Michigan’s November survey of consumer sentiment finds that Americans who don’t own stock have their lowest confidence level in the economy since the survey began querying stock ownership in 1998. An exception to this mood, the survey notes, is found among the largest stock owners, whose assessment of the economy has actually risen by 11 percent this year.

As Emma Janssen has reported in these pages, marketers are going where the money is, like bank robber Willie Sutton. First-class and business-seat travel on the airlines is booming, so much so that seating arrangements on Delta and United are being reconfigured to create more room for the affluent, while coach seats are going unfilled and “discount” airlines struggle. Revenues are up 3 percent this year at the Ritz-Carltons, the Four Seasons, and other luxury hotels, yet down by 3 percent at economy hotels. And when it comes to life’s biggest purchase—a home—the median age of first-time buyers reached 40 this year, an all-time high according to the National Association of Realtors.



“All right,” as John Dos Passos wrote in his U.S.A. trilogy in the depth of the Depression, “we are two nations.” Life in the nonaffluent nation is getting harder. According to a Brookings Institution analysis from last year, 43 percent of American families don’t earn enough to pay for housing, food, health care, child care, and transportation; every week, they must juggle which to pay and which not to pay. Among Black and Latino families, those figures rise to 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

snip

[mdbl]

1. The biggest hurdle to affordability is lack of competition

The total consolidation of industry has caused the same consolidation of political power into a handful of oligarchs. They are now at the end of their process of breaking down any law and order that used to reign in their abuses and many stupid American voters just keep voting for it.

[cstanleytech]

5. No, the biggest hurdle is to many of the wealthy are psychopaths.

[mdbl]

8. I agree with your psychopath assessment

But it's only a hurdle because we no longer have anyone in the government willing to make or enforce rules against nefarious economic actors.

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Minimum Wage Nation

Like slavery with benefits (for the owners, of course).

[JHB]

3. It's never called "redistribution of wealth" when it's redistributed upward.

[pimpbot]

4. problem is those people hurt most keep voting for it

Deep south is probably some of the poorest parts of the country, and they vote overwhelmingly for MAGA.

The latino shift in 2024 is also evidence of the propaganda we are up against and the ease they can fool people into voting against their best interest.

Democrats frankly suck at messaging. Everywhere I travel, I see road construction. Most have a sign "funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill". Do you think GOP would ever do a sign like that? It should read "this is a BIDEN project to keep America GREAT!" We need to toot our own horn, and exaggerate a little.

[progressoid]

7. And the wealthy own the media that keeps the poor misinformed

[hay rick]

6. Every media story about prices, inflation, or affordability should be a story about incomes.

The media frame becomes the way ordinary people talk about economic problems We are betrayed.

[lastlib]

9. The new road to serfdom.....

Eliminate every rule or program that supports the working class, and enhance everything that enriches the wealthy.

[Ol Janx Spirit]

10. Humans have an instinct to protect what they have and expand it if they can, and as long as...

...the wealthy can convince people that what they need to protect most is their religious freedom and access to guns then you can take all the money under the guise of helping them protect those things.

Sure, the other side may want to give you affordable healthcare, but they also want to take away your religious freedom and your guns.... We will protect your religious freedom and your guns for big tax cuts and deregulation and a low minimum-wage.

It has worked well. They think they are voting for their own interests.

Meanwhile, generational wealth slips away leaving their offspring even more vulnerable to the same arguments and even more desperate to protect what they still have.