Real Economics

From Corbin Trent (here...well worth reading the whole thing):

In 1950, median INDIVIDUAL income was $1,971. A median home cost $7,354. The nation spent about $83 per person for healthcare. A four-year college degree cost $852.

Do the math. 3.73 years of work to buy a house. One week of work for healthcare. Less than two months for a college degree.

In 2023, median personal income was $42,220. A median home costs $429,000. Healthcare runs $14,570 per person per year. A four-year degree costs nearly $40,000.

10.16 years of work to buy a house. Twelve weeks of work for healthcare. More than six months for college.

So wages went up 21x since 1950. Sounds great, right? But the essnetials the core things we need to survive went up much much faster.

Housing went up 58x. Healthcare went up 175x. College went up 47x. But as I showed in “The Cover Up,” the official inflation numbers hide most of this through hedonic adjustments and statistical manipulation. The experts tell us the cost of life went up maybe 3-4x instead of 50-175x. Inflation is under control, economists and politicians tell us.

....

When my uncle graduated from high school, he took a job as a bag boy at the local A&P. Made enough for an apartment, food, going out, and a new Camaro. My aunt went to ETSU, worked part-time, and graduated debt-free while paying her own way.

....

The government claims real wages have increased 252% since 1950. My math says we’ve lost 61% of our purchasing power....





Either we’re losing buying power for the foundations of life or basic math is wrong. Many of our statistics have become completely detached from reality.

The Gap That Breeds Rage

This gap between what the statistics say and what we live breeds the rage you see in our politics.

....The chart below shows the official claims about what our annual income buys in Blue and what my math figures for renters and owners in orange and red.





....Wall Street replaced wages with debt. When we couldn’t afford college, the financial industry gave us loans from Sallie Mae that we can’t discharge in bankruptcy. Can’t afford a house? Sign 30 years away to Wells Fargo. Can’t afford a car? Here’s an 84-month loan. Seven years of payments for a depreciating asset.

In 1950, household debt was $47 billion. Today it exceeds $17.1 trillion. When measured in years of work at median wages, the debt burden has grown from eight weeks of work in 1950 to 63 weeks today. A 670% increase.




What once took one year of labor now demands over three. This isn’t prosperity.

The Distraction

Here’s the trick. Economists and politicians point to the cheap TV. The smartphone. The streaming services. Look how much better life is. You have technology your grandparents couldn’t dream of.

Sure. Electronics got cheaper. I can buy a 55” TV for $300. My grandpa’s 19” black-and-white cost $200 in 1950. That’s equivalent to $2,400 today.

But while the TV got cheaper, everything that actually matters got more expensive. Housing is up 7x since 1980. The official stats say 3.7x. Healthcare is up 13x. Official stats hide 9.3x of that. College is up 12x. Official stats hide 8.3x. Food is up 5.7x. Official stats hide 2x.

As I detailed in “The Cover Up,” roughly 50-60% of actual inflation gets hidden through hedonic adjustments, Owner’s Equivalent Rent, and basket re-weighting....

The Political Consequences

Trump didn’t cause this disaster. He exploited it. He saw the anger, the despair, the realization that the American Dream had become a scam. He told people their pain was real. The system was rigged. Their leaders had failed them. And unlike the economists and media pundits, he never told them to learn to code.

That’s why he won in 2016, and again in 2024.

But look what happened this month. Democrats swept Virginia, New Jersey, and NYC. Voters sided with Democrats on the economy despite Republican advantages on crime and immigration. Independents swung hard left. Trump’s approval on the economy has cratered.

We’re still broke. Now we’re blaming him for it.

But Democrats haven’t see the light yet either. Most of them don’t see the collapse because their numbers tell them everything’s fine. They’re incapable of fixing a crisis unless they can see it exists.

This is what happens when Reagan legalizes stock buybacks, when the Boskin Commission embeds statistical lies, when both parties tell people for forty years that they’re imagining their own decline. People stop trusting institutions. Not because we’re irrational. Because the institutions are lying.

What Any Real Solution Requires

Any politician promising affordability without a bold plan to shift power back to working people is full of shit.

Tweaking tax credits or adjusting interest rates ian’t going to restore affordability in any meaningful sense. We’re need to reverse a 50-year transfer of $79 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. We’re talking about breaking up monopolies and oligopolies that control our healthcare, our housing, our food. We’re talking about rebuilding unions strong enough to actually negotiate with capital. We’re talking about public ownership and public competition in captured markets.

That takes political power. Real political power. Not the kind you get from being polite or following Senate norms or designing another program with so many hoops nobody can use it. The kind you get from organizing millions of people who are tired of trading their lives for survival while Wall Street and the executives they enriched get richer.

We used to build things in this country. Real things that lifted everyone up. When we invested in ourselves, roads, dams, public universities, the research that created the internet, everybody got richer. Not just the people at the top.

We can do that again. But first we have to be honest about where we are.

These days GDP growth is disconnected from real tangible production. It is fueled by a parasitic elite take more from us. Stock markets soar while families drown in debt. Official real wages rise on paper while buying power crashes in real life. We work harder than our parents did and fall further behind. More and more of us have insurance and still go can’t afford to go to the doctor. We do everything right and still drown in debt.

The people who rigged this system are still telling us everything’s fine. The executives who legalized looting through stock buybacks. The economists who embedded the statistical lies. The politicians who protected the theft.

The Choice

We can keep measuring success by numbers designed to hide our decline. Or we can start building an economy that actually serves the people who make it work.

Right now we’re not just declining. We’re being stripped for parts. One week of our lives at a time. Ten years of labor for a house that used to take three. One decade of debt for an education that used to cost a part-time job.

The parasitic elite aren’t stealing our money. They’re stealing our time. Our lives. The years we’ll never get back.

No amount of statistical manipulation can hide that theft anymore. We see it now.

We need to start thinking about building what we need together, as a people. America is ready for systemic change. Hell, Trump has already done a lot of the destruction. The old order is weakened.

The question is are we ready to knock it over and build something beautiful in its place. Will “We The People” be at the table?

Corbin Trent