Corbin Trent's Broadcast Touts "Abundance," But Mentions Accurate Things Too

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Excerpt:

Noah Smit and I chat it up: The Math of Middle-Class Life No Longer Adds Up
He tells me that economic progress 'utterly indisputable' while families spend 181% of income on necessities. This is the expert-reality gap breaking American politics.

I just spent an hour with economist Noah Smith, who declared generational economic progress "utterly indisputable." Meanwhile, I'm looking at BLS data showingthat the bottom 80% of Americans spend 105% of their income on basic necessities. The bottom 20% spend 181% of their income on essentials - food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, and healthcare. They're surviving only through government subsidies and debt.

Noah's response? We're "living like kings" compared to the 1950s because we have bigger houses and more food.

This conversation showed me it's not a policy tweak problem - it's about understanding how far from affordable life actually is. If politicians don't understand how far from affordability people are, there's no chance of them fixing the problem because they won't understand the scale of it.

It's like the difference between a candle you can blow out versus a house fire that needs the fire department. The scale of the problem determines the scale of your solution. But according to most economists, we don't really have a problem at all. When they talk about affordability, they mean minor price adjustments, not making life actually affordable again. There's no real solution required because economically speaking, we're in a prime spot.

When families spend more than they earn on necessities while experts celebrate progress, you get Trump. You get January 6th. You get people willing to burn it all down because the math of their lives doesn't add up, and the people who understand economics keep telling them they're wrong about their own reality.

The purchasing power of the median income has collapsed across every necessity. Housing now requires 5.6 years of median wage to purchase, compared to 2-4 years from the 1940s through 1970s. Healthcare costs have increased 10-fold per capita relative to median income. College costs have risen 252% in real terms since the 1960s. Childcare now consumes 27% of typical household income, nearly four times what experts consider affordable.

But here's what makes this crisis deeper than individual household budgets: we're also facing a public affordability crisis. Healthcare exemplifies both problems simultaneously. Those costs don't just hit families directly - they're dispersed across multiple sources: personal payments, employer contributions, government programs. Combined, our healthcare system will cost $77 trillion over the next 10 years, reaching 20% of GDP by 2033.

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[Conclusion]

The growing unrest we see - from Trump's election to January 6th to widespread protests - reflects working people's recognition that the old promises no longer add up. But that discontent could be mobilized toward prosperity if people believed there was a real path forward for their families, communities, and nation.

The math of middle-class life is broken. We can't sit around hoping the market fixes things - it won't. These interconnected crises require coordinated solutions at the scale of our greatest national mobilizations. The question isn't whether we need a Mission for America. The question is whether we'll build one that serves working families or continue to think we're living like kings while everything falls apart.