PROOF Trump's "Rockin" Economy is Actually Sinking Like the Titanic

New data shows 60% of Americans aren't able to live a "minimal quality of life" while households now need to earn $114K for a median-priced home. But politicians & the media say everything is great!

“We are rockin,” President Trump recently boasted during a speech in Saudi Arabia while simultaneously showering the murderous, journalist-dismembering Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with praise.

Trump was bragging about the U.S. economy, which he described as the “hottest” economy in the world (well, actually second to Saudi Arabia, which he joked was hotter). While Trump sedately serenaded Saudi elites—and Elon Musk—about how strong the U.S. economy is, several new indicators were released revealing just how dire the real economic picture is for working people. And, of course, mainstream media glossed over it entirely.

This news is unlikely to come as a surprise to working people, but a report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), found that the bottom 60 percent of Americans cannot afford a “minimal quality of life.” Yes, you read that correctly — well over half, or a majority, of Americans, are merely treading water economically. Put another way, only 40 percent of Americans can afford what the report’s authors have deemed a “minimal quality of life.”

More simply stated: a minority of Americans can’t live comfortably in the wealthiest country on earth.

To be clear, this is not just a Trump thing. Former President Biden infamously boasted about“Bidenomics”— and how he was presiding over a “historic” economy—as the majority of Americans were struggling to stay afloat. Before Biden, over the last 40 years, Democratic and Republican presidents have alternated myths of their respective “roaring economies”—while reality clearly proved otherwise (the chart doesn’t lie).

So, what are they defining as “a minimal quality of life”? The authors state that when constructing their study, they looked at “not just the bare necessities for survival, but the broader expenses necessary to live even a minimally fulfilling life in contemporary America.” They also aimed to provide an “expansive reflection of the costs associated with a dignified life in the United States, one providing a glimpse of the American Dream.”

Here, a minimal quality of life refers not just to the ability to afford the bare minimum in necessities—like rent and food—but also things like access to higher education and student loans, daycare costs, work-appropriate clothing, medications and insurance premiums, household expenses like dish soap and paper towels, the phone and laptop many need for work, and dare I say, the occasional night out with your spouse and a small gift or two for your children. In short, all of the associated costs with keeping a job, raising a family, maintaining a home, and living a comfortable life.

Typically, if you work for a paycheck, there is a hierarchy of payments with things like rent and food making up the most critical, and most burdensome, section. Once your rent is paid and you’ve been fed, then and only then, can you spend money on other “non-essentials,” like a doctor’s visits, new sneakers for your kid, medication, new brake pads, etc. This is where tough choices are made and bills get pushed around like a warped game of Tetris—where every piece is another layer of precarity and every move a struggle averted or fallen into.

[WATCH ASHLEY’S COMPANION VIDEO TO THIS STORY]

And how many of us are playing Tetris-bills every month? Let’s do some math here…

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were about 131.4 million households in the U.S. in 2022. This means that “the bottom 60 percent” they are referring to is equivalent to roughly 79 million households. Once again, 79 million households, made up of individual people just like you and I, in the U.S. — the wealthiest country in the history of the world — can’t reach a minimal quality of life.

What’s more is that this “bottom” 60 percent—which, again, is actually the “bottom”— had an average annual income of just $38,000. Furthermore, of that bottom, earners would need to nearly double their income to $67,000 to reach that minimal quality of life.

If the only economic indicators you’re looking at to gauge the general economic health of a population are “are you able to pay your rent” and “are you able to feed yourself,” you’re going to miss a lot of crucial details (never mind that the answer to those two questions trends toward “no” for many).

The LISEP report sought to rectify this mistake, and more broadly speaking, 40-years-worth of manufacturing of consent by politicians and the mainstream media. How it has worked is simple: economic reports, and polls, are generated depicting a rose-colored framing of the U.S. economy that zeroes in on mostly on artificial—rather than kitchen table—metrics including “rising GDP,” “low unemployment,” “a surging stock market” and more. The deceptive economic framing then funnels its way into the hands of elected representatives and mainstream media, who then regurgitate platitudes about our “strong economy.”

One of the most egregious of the economic platitudes—or lies—deals with unemployment figures. As reported by Politico piece—unfortunately after the 2024 presidential election when it had minimal impact—the current national unemployment rate is said to be 4.2 percent; but here again, that’s only part of the story. This number does not reflect the many Americans who looked for a job for so long they gave up and stopped looking, those who are underemployed, and people making poverty wages (some of whom make so little they remain homeless while working).

Once all of these details are accounted for the actual rate of unemployment, our functional unemployment, rises from 4.2 percent to an astounding…

24 percent.

Do you know what the top unemployment rate during the Great Depression was?

25 percent.

And if this wasn’t dreary enough data for you, there was more horrible economic news that came out while Trump was partying it up in the Middle East.

Two more reports added to what amounts to a rotten cherry on top of an already melted ice cream sundae. According to a report from realtor.com, U.S. households now need to earn 70.1 percent more just to afford a median-priced home than they did six years ago. This 70.1 percent represents a required income jump from $67,000 annually to $114,000. And if you are one of the lucky 40 percent who can afford the $114,000 required to now purchase a median-priced home, will you even be able to hang onto it?

A second report from ATTOM would indicate…probably not.

Why?

Well, U.S. foreclosure filings have risen 14 percent over the last year.

Again, none of this is likely to come as a surprise to working people — we are living this reality and we know it well. It’s only our elected representatives, wealthy elites, and an out-of-touch corporate media who seem to need a study to affirm what working people have been saying for 40 years.

We are struggling. If you yourself are lucky enough to not be affected by any of this, you probably know one or more people who are. While working people’s lives have become less and less year over year (less by way of opportunity, wealth, time, and health), the billionaire class has increased its share of all of the above — not through merit, but by stealing it away from the rest of us.

An OxFam report on inequality released in January 2025, states: “Global billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion in 2024, three times faster than the year before, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day. The world is now on track to see five trillionaires within a decade, the latest annual Oxfam inequality report reveals today.

Meanwhile, according to the World Bank, the number of people still living in poverty — around 3.5 billion — has barely changed since 1990. It warns that “progress on poverty reduction has slowed to a standstill and that extreme poverty could be ended three times faster if inequality were to be reduced.”

The report adds, “In 2024, the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, up from 2,565 in 2023. Their combined wealth surged from $13 trillion to $15 trillion in just 12 months. This is the second-largest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began.”

Like thieves in the night, the billionaire class has made the American middle class all-but extinct. Neoliberal policy has privatized the gains of the last 40 years—and saddled us all with all the burden of their failures (See: the Great Recession, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and on and on).

For those of you who are thinking, haven’t we been here before? You would be right. In 1890, during the first Gilded Age, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans controlled 51 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 44 percent held just 1.1 percent. John D. Rockefeller’s wealth alone represented roughly 1.5 percent of the entire GDP of the U.S. — approximately $447 billion now.

From 1980 to 2023, wealth inequality has risen to heights not seen since that first Gilded Age. As of 2024, the elite 1 percent — as Bernie has been telling us — control nearly a third of the nation's wealth, while the top 10 percent hold approximately 67 percent. The bottom half of working people just barely grasp onto 2.5 percent. By the end of 2024, 21st century robber baron, Elon Musk’s net worth peaked at $486 billion — which was about 1.6 percent total U.S. GDP. Though, by March his net worth had dropped to a pauper’s sum of $330 billion, he remains the richest man in the world.

Labor historian, Stephen Fraser, has termed our time, the Second Gilded Age. In his book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015), Fraser wrote: ”The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion.”

Welcome to the Second Gilded Age, where 60 percent of us cannot reach a minimal quality of life. This affront to democratic sensibilities is the creation of both parties.

And it isn’t simply that people become poorer, more economically and spiritually deprived. With each step down a rung, people become more and more desperate, leaving them vulnerable to vultures like Trump, Vance, Musk, and Noem, who tell them, “I understand that you’re suffering and I can tell you why. It’s that immigrant family down the street who’s to blame. Those people working for a pittance doing the jobs that keep our country running. They’re getting your benefits, they’re getting your jobs, they’re stealing your American dream.”

I spoke to a woman outside of the Delaney Hall Immigration Detention Center last week who told me, while blinking back tears, she’s ex-military and a single mom. Her husband, also ex-military, had passed away. She’s now disabled and has been fighting for three years to get social security benefits. She was insistent that the democrats are bussing in immigrants who are immediately given social security — the benefits she feels she deserves for having fought for this county.

Their suffering is real, their conclusions are wrong.

As I have said elsewhere, in many different ways, this is why the democrats lost. It wasn’t their messaging, it was their unwillingness to provide any policy solutions for the things that actually matter to working people — their material conditions. Their failure to allow for the conditions that enable people to meet their basic needs. (Sure, some people are just racist, bootlickers that can’t be helped, but that’s not half of the country, and those aren’t the people we’re talking about.) Instead, they care only about serving their real constituents, the billionaire and donor class.

In our last election, 36 percent of eligible voters did not vote. That’s roughly 90 million people — our largest voting block. Why vote when cycle after cycle, no matter which party is sitting in office, you see your life getting worse and worse? Why participate in democracy when this is what democracy seems to provide for you? For at least 60 percent of us it has become precarity and struggle.

If we had an honest media, our headlines would scream little outside of how the billionaire class has siphoned up and away all of the opportunity, wealth, and resources that this county has to offer and left working people with strife, division, and inexorable struggle. Corporate media has had decades to “speak truth to power” and take an honest, holistic appraisal of how working people are doing in this country — without conflating that with how well the richest among us are doing. But, they don’t. Instead, we get a slew of stories about how well the stock market is doing (i.e., how the rich folks are feeling) until we find ourselves here, with 60% of us unable to hold onto even a sliver of the mirage that is the American dream.

Doesn’t sound very “rockin’” to me.

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