Every few months one of these charts goes around showing real GDP going up in almost every state. The most recent one is straight from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and it says real GDP actually went up in 46 states plus DC in the first quarter of 2026 (bea.gov/data/gdp/gdp-state). Washington state grew the fastest at 4.5%, South Dakota was the only one that really shrank, down 1.6%. But basically the whole map is green. And when people see something like that, it’s easy to think, well, the economy’s obviously doing great, so anyone complaining must just not be paying attention.
But before we go down that road, it’s worth remembering what the government actually signed up to do. The founding fathers didn’t just say “grow the economy and call it a day.” They put it right in the Constitution’s preamble that the government is supposed to “promote the general Welfare” of the people. That’s not just a nice phrase, it’s basically a job description. So when the big numbers look amazing but regular people still can’t afford a house, healthcare, childcare, or school, that’s not just a weird data quirk. That’s the government not doing the one thing it promised to do.
Anyway. The people who say the economy feels bad aren’t crazy and they’re not making it up. They’re just looking at completely different numbers than the ones on the news.
Here’s the thing about GDP: it only tells you how much stuff got made and sold. It doesn’t tell you who actually got paid for any of it, and it definitely doesn’t tell you what it costs to actually live. That’s the part everyone skips over. If you actually want to know why people are stressed, you gotta look at something called the Cost of Thriving Index, or COTI for short. It’s built around four things: housing, healthcare, education, and childcare (americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index). The stuff you literally cannot opt out of. And once you look at those four things instead of the big GDP number, everything flips.
Paychecks really have gone up a decent amount over the last ten years, something like 42%. Sounds pretty good on its own. But in that same stretch of time, home prices jumped 60 to 70%, and that’s coming from the same Cost of Thriving numbers (americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index). In most states right now, putting two kids in daycare costs more than rent does. Back in the 80s, one person working a normal job could cover housing, healthcare, education, and childcare in about 40 weeks of work, and still have three months of pay left over for groceries, savings, whatever. Now those same four things eat up more than 60 weeks of pay. There’s no such thing as a 60 week year, that’s the whole point. One income just can’t do it anymore, period. You basically need two people working full time just to break even.
Now somebody’s gonna say, well, real median income already adjusts for inflation, so this can’t be true. And yeah, it does adjust for inflation, but it uses this thing called hedonic quality adjustment. Basically if a house or a car costs 20% more but some economist decides it’s also 20% “better,” they just count that as zero inflation. Sounds fine on paper. But in real life it means a young couple who just wants a small basic starter house like you could get in 1985 literally cannot buy that anymore, because it doesn’t exist. Nobody builds it. The cheapest way into owning any kind of home has exploded, and the official stats just chalk that up to “upgrades” instead of what it actually is.
Food’s the other thing people bring up, and it’s a fair point honestly. COTI doesn’t ignore food, it just doesn’t count it as one of the big four, because you can actually swap food out. Housing and healthcare, not so much. If steak’s too expensive you buy chicken instead, and that’s literally the trick real median income uses to make inflation look smaller. But you can’t just buy a cheaper mortgage. You can’t get a discount version of health insurance or daycare. Those are locked in costs you have to pay just to live a normal life, which is why they matter more than food does in this whole conversation.
So when people say they feel poorer even though the charts say everyone’s richer, that’s not some mass delusion. That’s just people accurately describing what it actually takes to get by versus what their paycheck covers.
And now there’s a totally separate study backing this up from a completely different angle. A new piece that ran through The Conversation and got picked up by Fortune ranked the US against every other OECD country on whether people can actually get the basics of a decent life, not just whether the economy is technically growing (fortune.com/2026/07/13/us-worst-oecd-fair-pay-score). On the specific measure of dignified work and fair pay, meaning can you find a job and does it pay enough to live on, the US scored a 27%. Worst in the entire OECD. And that score’s been dropping for 25 years straight, from about 62% back in 2000 down to 51% now, even while the country got way richer overall, because the money just kept flowing up to the top. Which, funny enough, is exactly what trickle down economics promised wouldn’t happen. Republicans have been selling that idea for decades, the theory that if you let money pool at the top it’ll eventually trickle down to everyone else. Some economists even nicknamed it “horse and sparrow” economics, as in, feed the horse enough oats and eventually there’ll be something left in the road for the sparrows. Forty plus years later, the horse seems to be doing just fine. The sparrows are still out here waiting.
And this isn’t just a vibe either, there’s an actual paper trail. Pew Research tracked it: back in 1971, 61% of Americans were middle class. By 2023 that had dropped to 51% (pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class). Meanwhile the lower income tier grew from 27% to 30%, and the upper income tier nearly doubled, going from 11% to 19%. Now some people are gonna look at that upper tier number and think, see, more people got rich, so trickle down actually worked. But that’s reading it backwards. If trickle down was actually doing what it claims, you’d expect the lower tier to shrink over time too, since all that wealth is supposedly trickling down and lifting people out of it. Instead the lower tier grew, from 27% to 30%. More people fell into it, not fewer. And it looks even worse when you check income share instead of headcount: middle class households used to hold 62% of all US household income back in 1971. By 2022 that had fallen to 43%, while the upper tier’s slice just kept getting bigger. That’s not a rising tide lifting all boats. That’s the tide pulling water away from the middle and the bottom and dumping it into one very large yacht. A shrinking middle, a growing lower tier, and a booming top isn’t trickle down working, it’s wealth concentrating upward with better PR.
Food told the same story too. From 2015 to 2023, as the US economy got wealthier, fewer Americans could actually afford healthy food, not more.
So that’s really the whole thing in one sentence. The country clearly has the money, it’s sitting on a 32 trillion dollar economy. It’s just not turning that money into actual basics for the people living here. GDP keeps going up. The four bills that actually matter keep going up faster. And now a totally different group of researchers, using totally different methods, landed on the exact same conclusion the Cost of Thriving numbers already showed. The growth is real. It just stopped reaching regular people a long time ago. And that general welfare thing the founders wrote in? That was never supposed to be optional.
Yet another one of the people in my circle is fighting cancer and has to GOFUNDME their health expenses.
But hey the stock market's doing great and that's what really counts, right? /s
Most companies are sending work overseas. Which will eventually kill their own consumer base which is why it’s not the smartest long term strategy.
I can understand it as a an over flow strategy or if real talent can’t be found.
Education, housing, and healthcare all eventually get tied right back to work or the pursuit of it so I’m not really seeing the long term logic in cutting education funding, furthering educational opportunities after high school, or making food insecurity worse for really anyone.
Housing and food tie into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
It doesn’t do anything to benefit the greater population and actually has harmed it. Even if you take debt and social relations out of the equation, corporations have been linked to environmental disasters, health issues and deaths, knowingly in some cases. This has eroded public trust and confidence because nothing but fines ever came out of it.
There could be argument about the government failing to uphold workplace protections laws with accidents depending on how far back you want to look. Or that town that was on toxic garbage.
Okay, well since I haven’t heard from you after I asked for clarity and I see that you’ve responded elsewhere, I’ll answer your question the best I can.
Corporate profits and stock prices being up doesn’t really undercut the argument, it’s actually part of it. That’s where the money’s been going instead of into paychecks keeping pace with housing and healthcare. As for stocks helping regular people, only about 58% of Americans own any stock at all, and most of that is retirement accounts, not spendable income. The top 10% of households own something like 87% of all stock market wealth. So corporate profits climbing mostly means the people who already had money got more of it, while the rest are still stuck measuring their life against rent and daycare bills, not a portfolio balance. That’s kind of the whole point, the GDP and stock charts look great because that’s exactly where the growth has been concentrating instead of into everyday wages.
It's a joke for a reason. I'm over 40 and have been employed in white collar jobs my whole life. No employer cares about you. If they can make more money by getting rid of you, they will in a heartbeat. I've watched numerous top tier coworkers be treated like shit because the company could squeeze them for more production for less pay. It's a short sighted strategy that has caused me to change companies multiple times.
Sorry, I shouldn't have made the joke. In my anecdotal experience, employers in the USA tend to pay just enough to keep people from leaving for another job. They can technically afford to pay their employees more, but are beholden to quarterly profit reports. My current company just layed of key people just to make their short term books look better, completely ignoring how it will impact the business in the next few years.
[OP] _RyanLarkin | 10 hours ago
Every few months one of these charts goes around showing real GDP going up in almost every state. The most recent one is straight from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and it says real GDP actually went up in 46 states plus DC in the first quarter of 2026 (bea.gov/data/gdp/gdp-state). Washington state grew the fastest at 4.5%, South Dakota was the only one that really shrank, down 1.6%. But basically the whole map is green. And when people see something like that, it’s easy to think, well, the economy’s obviously doing great, so anyone complaining must just not be paying attention.
But before we go down that road, it’s worth remembering what the government actually signed up to do. The founding fathers didn’t just say “grow the economy and call it a day.” They put it right in the Constitution’s preamble that the government is supposed to “promote the general Welfare” of the people. That’s not just a nice phrase, it’s basically a job description. So when the big numbers look amazing but regular people still can’t afford a house, healthcare, childcare, or school, that’s not just a weird data quirk. That’s the government not doing the one thing it promised to do.
Anyway. The people who say the economy feels bad aren’t crazy and they’re not making it up. They’re just looking at completely different numbers than the ones on the news.
Here’s the thing about GDP: it only tells you how much stuff got made and sold. It doesn’t tell you who actually got paid for any of it, and it definitely doesn’t tell you what it costs to actually live. That’s the part everyone skips over. If you actually want to know why people are stressed, you gotta look at something called the Cost of Thriving Index, or COTI for short. It’s built around four things: housing, healthcare, education, and childcare (americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index). The stuff you literally cannot opt out of. And once you look at those four things instead of the big GDP number, everything flips.
Paychecks really have gone up a decent amount over the last ten years, something like 42%. Sounds pretty good on its own. But in that same stretch of time, home prices jumped 60 to 70%, and that’s coming from the same Cost of Thriving numbers (americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index). In most states right now, putting two kids in daycare costs more than rent does. Back in the 80s, one person working a normal job could cover housing, healthcare, education, and childcare in about 40 weeks of work, and still have three months of pay left over for groceries, savings, whatever. Now those same four things eat up more than 60 weeks of pay. There’s no such thing as a 60 week year, that’s the whole point. One income just can’t do it anymore, period. You basically need two people working full time just to break even.
Now somebody’s gonna say, well, real median income already adjusts for inflation, so this can’t be true. And yeah, it does adjust for inflation, but it uses this thing called hedonic quality adjustment. Basically if a house or a car costs 20% more but some economist decides it’s also 20% “better,” they just count that as zero inflation. Sounds fine on paper. But in real life it means a young couple who just wants a small basic starter house like you could get in 1985 literally cannot buy that anymore, because it doesn’t exist. Nobody builds it. The cheapest way into owning any kind of home has exploded, and the official stats just chalk that up to “upgrades” instead of what it actually is.
Food’s the other thing people bring up, and it’s a fair point honestly. COTI doesn’t ignore food, it just doesn’t count it as one of the big four, because you can actually swap food out. Housing and healthcare, not so much. If steak’s too expensive you buy chicken instead, and that’s literally the trick real median income uses to make inflation look smaller. But you can’t just buy a cheaper mortgage. You can’t get a discount version of health insurance or daycare. Those are locked in costs you have to pay just to live a normal life, which is why they matter more than food does in this whole conversation.
So when people say they feel poorer even though the charts say everyone’s richer, that’s not some mass delusion. That’s just people accurately describing what it actually takes to get by versus what their paycheck covers.
And now there’s a totally separate study backing this up from a completely different angle. A new piece that ran through The Conversation and got picked up by Fortune ranked the US against every other OECD country on whether people can actually get the basics of a decent life, not just whether the economy is technically growing (fortune.com/2026/07/13/us-worst-oecd-fair-pay-score). On the specific measure of dignified work and fair pay, meaning can you find a job and does it pay enough to live on, the US scored a 27%. Worst in the entire OECD. And that score’s been dropping for 25 years straight, from about 62% back in 2000 down to 51% now, even while the country got way richer overall, because the money just kept flowing up to the top. Which, funny enough, is exactly what trickle down economics promised wouldn’t happen. Republicans have been selling that idea for decades, the theory that if you let money pool at the top it’ll eventually trickle down to everyone else. Some economists even nicknamed it “horse and sparrow” economics, as in, feed the horse enough oats and eventually there’ll be something left in the road for the sparrows. Forty plus years later, the horse seems to be doing just fine. The sparrows are still out here waiting.
And this isn’t just a vibe either, there’s an actual paper trail. Pew Research tracked it: back in 1971, 61% of Americans were middle class. By 2023 that had dropped to 51% (pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class). Meanwhile the lower income tier grew from 27% to 30%, and the upper income tier nearly doubled, going from 11% to 19%. Now some people are gonna look at that upper tier number and think, see, more people got rich, so trickle down actually worked. But that’s reading it backwards. If trickle down was actually doing what it claims, you’d expect the lower tier to shrink over time too, since all that wealth is supposedly trickling down and lifting people out of it. Instead the lower tier grew, from 27% to 30%. More people fell into it, not fewer. And it looks even worse when you check income share instead of headcount: middle class households used to hold 62% of all US household income back in 1971. By 2022 that had fallen to 43%, while the upper tier’s slice just kept getting bigger. That’s not a rising tide lifting all boats. That’s the tide pulling water away from the middle and the bottom and dumping it into one very large yacht. A shrinking middle, a growing lower tier, and a booming top isn’t trickle down working, it’s wealth concentrating upward with better PR.
Food told the same story too. From 2015 to 2023, as the US economy got wealthier, fewer Americans could actually afford healthy food, not more.
So that’s really the whole thing in one sentence. The country clearly has the money, it’s sitting on a 32 trillion dollar economy. It’s just not turning that money into actual basics for the people living here. GDP keeps going up. The four bills that actually matter keep going up faster. And now a totally different group of researchers, using totally different methods, landed on the exact same conclusion the Cost of Thriving numbers already showed. The growth is real. It just stopped reaching regular people a long time ago. And that general welfare thing the founders wrote in? That was never supposed to be optional.
Grimke42 | 5 hours ago
I appreciate the context you provide here. Thanks for the post
tiregroove | 10 hours ago
Yet another one of the people in my circle is fighting cancer and has to GOFUNDME their health expenses.
But hey the stock market's doing great and that's what really counts, right? /s
Splashy01 | 3 hours ago
He should have thought about that before he decided to get cancer—like WTF!?
/s
Resident-Trouble4483 | 40 minutes ago
Most companies are sending work overseas. Which will eventually kill their own consumer base which is why it’s not the smartest long term strategy.
I can understand it as a an over flow strategy or if real talent can’t be found.
Education, housing, and healthcare all eventually get tied right back to work or the pursuit of it so I’m not really seeing the long term logic in cutting education funding, furthering educational opportunities after high school, or making food insecurity worse for really anyone.
Housing and food tie into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
It doesn’t do anything to benefit the greater population and actually has harmed it. Even if you take debt and social relations out of the equation, corporations have been linked to environmental disasters, health issues and deaths, knowingly in some cases. This has eroded public trust and confidence because nothing but fines ever came out of it.
There could be argument about the government failing to uphold workplace protections laws with accidents depending on how far back you want to look. Or that town that was on toxic garbage.
TheHalf | 9 hours ago
Sure but you aren't taking profits and stock prices into account.
[OP] _RyanLarkin | 8 hours ago
Okay, well since I haven’t heard from you after I asked for clarity and I see that you’ve responded elsewhere, I’ll answer your question the best I can.
Corporate profits and stock prices being up doesn’t really undercut the argument, it’s actually part of it. That’s where the money’s been going instead of into paychecks keeping pace with housing and healthcare. As for stocks helping regular people, only about 58% of Americans own any stock at all, and most of that is retirement accounts, not spendable income. The top 10% of households own something like 87% of all stock market wealth. So corporate profits climbing mostly means the people who already had money got more of it, while the rest are still stuck measuring their life against rent and daycare bills, not a portfolio balance. That’s kind of the whole point, the GDP and stock charts look great because that’s exactly where the growth has been concentrating instead of into everyday wages.
RMAPOS | 8 hours ago
They were making a joke.
A joke that gets posted literally every time reddit talks about greedy companies.
TheHalf | 7 hours ago
It's a joke for a reason. I'm over 40 and have been employed in white collar jobs my whole life. No employer cares about you. If they can make more money by getting rid of you, they will in a heartbeat. I've watched numerous top tier coworkers be treated like shit because the company could squeeze them for more production for less pay. It's a short sighted strategy that has caused me to change companies multiple times.
RMAPOS | 7 hours ago
Oh I wasn't harping on it's validity, my brain simply gets bored with "today it's my turn to post it" kinda jokes.
TheHalf | 7 hours ago
Fair enough
TheHalf | 7 hours ago
Sorry, I shouldn't have made the joke. In my anecdotal experience, employers in the USA tend to pay just enough to keep people from leaving for another job. They can technically afford to pay their employees more, but are beholden to quarterly profit reports. My current company just layed of key people just to make their short term books look better, completely ignoring how it will impact the business in the next few years.
[OP] _RyanLarkin | 9 hours ago
I want to address your point. Can you clarify what you mean so that I can properly address it?