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.

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