The Economy for Real Americans is Not the One We Talk About
- Kevin Lankes
- Jul 16
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 17
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CeOUvaCDuAg
When we hear about “the economy,” we hear about things like GDP, the gross domestic product, we hear about the unemployment rate, and we hear about the stock market. What’s the NASDAQ doing? What’s that ticker ticking on about these days?
These, we’re told, are the health indicators of the economy. These are the things traditional legacy media tells us about, and these are things that come out in the reports we get from the government agencies that oversee this stuff. But are these the things that really matter to regular people? They are not. Sorry, spoilers. But they’re not.
I have an alternative proposal for an alternative data set and economic indicators that actually matter. I’d like to call this my Regular American Economic Landscape, or REAL Economy. We'll pretend the E and A are reversed, for our purposes, because we can.
Let’s look at what I consider the REAL economy based on all the available numbers, including other indicators that nobody talks about but that are actually affecting the vast majority of Americans far more than the so-called official numbers ever have.
First off, the official numbers that claim to represent the health of the American economy don’t actually represent that at all. And even if they did, they are heavily curated. They are designed that way to look better than they are. Nowhere can this be seen more egregiously than with the unemployment rate. Officially, the Bureau of Labor Statistics or BLS says the unemployment rate is currently 4.1% as of June 2025. But the data they use conveniently leaves out a shit ton of people. So many people are left out of the official government unemployment rate that unofficial reports go as high as 24%. A lot of those people are what’s called functionally unemployed. In other words, they’re gig economy workers or part-time workers, or even just full-time job holders that make less than around $38,000 a year. But there’s also the people who aren’t looking for jobs because they’ve given up. The government just straight up does not count certain people in their unemployment statistics. If you’re homeless and you live in a tent city under a bridge but you’ve worked one single hour in the past two weeks, the government says you’re employed. It’s nonsense.
So, the unemployment rate is bullshit, and I did a much deeper dive into it in my last video, so check that out if you’re interested. But we have much more bullshit to home in on so let’s get to that right now.
Let’s talk about income. The median weekly pay of American workers is $1,139. That’s it. Just over a thousand dollars. The estimated median annual earnings was $47,960 in 2022, according to data from the Census. 58.5% of working people make less than $50,000. 85% of working people make less than $100,000. Only 15% of working Americans make over $100,000. I think people have these numbers just so completely skewed and the assumptions in all our heads are way out of whack and very wrong. For instance, to be in the top 1% of earners in America you have to make $422,000. I think people feel like lots of us make that. But just one percent of us do. And that one percent takes home 21% of all income generated in the U.S. every year. Put another way, the top 1% makes 26.3 times as much as the other 99%. People say that CEOs work hard, I personally think that’s not true in the least. I’ve never met a CEO that worked as hard as the rest of my coworkers. Regular Americans work way harder in a single day than a CEO probably works in a month, or even several months. Regardless, even if you have the rosiest views on CEO work ethics, it’s unlikely you’re going to admit that they deserve the same pay it would take for you and 25 of your clones to generate each year. If we look back at the years between 1978-2023, CEO pay increased a whopping 1,085%. During that same exact time period, wages for regular working Americans went up just 24%.
People in the past have never lost a chance to say dumb things like, just get a degree in an in-demand field. Or go to trade school. Well, you can see how you’re just still going to end up with that 24% wage increase in 45 years. And now all the tech jobs are getting taken over by artificial intelligence and I for one could not be more giggly about all that. But sure, they’re not coming for certain trades, yet. But they will. People are still playing this game as if they even have a chance. And just continuing to push other people down so they can stay above water and gaze longingly at the C-suite class. The game we’re playing is Monopoly and we don’t even have a token on the board. It’s like if Monopoly were a pro sport with spectators and fans who just followed and fellated some of big players. It’s weird.
In addition to low wages and dismal wage growth, survey data tells us that 70% of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. This phenomenon isn’t limited to those of us with lower salaries or inconsistent employment. It’s 70% of all Americans. So sure, you could argue in this case that some people should know better. But then you wouldn’t be taking into account some of the reasons we might be in this mess. It’s one thing if this number was like, ten percent. But it’s not. If something is affecting everyone, you have to come to the conclusion that it was designed this way. And what’s that thing in this case? Debt.
Let’s talk about debt. The total household debt in America hit a record high in February when it broke $18 trillion dollars. This is the sum of all of the kinds of debt Americans accrue.
You might think, well certain debt is not a big indication of economic health because people did it to themselves. Credit card debt, for example, is a very big boogeyman for staunch armchair disciples of Supply-Side Jesus. The current total credit card debt in America is $1.2 trillion. The average debt held by individual cardholders is $7,321. But that’s the average, not the mean. And it goes up to $9,382 in New Jersey? For some reason? I don’t know. I guess the good news is that delinquency rates are just over 3%, which means that most Americans can pay the debt they accrue on time, while mostly carrying that balance into the future and living paycheck to paycheck. Add to this all the predatory bullshit. The average APR, for example, is over 21% now, and the average APR for new card offers right now is 24.33%. You will owe a quarter of the amount of the purchase price for an item or service you buy if you just, I don’t know, have an emergency or forget to pay off your card one month. And then you’re just f*cked.
And it’s not like we’re just spending on nonsense just to spend. According to the data, the highest costs for people are housing at around 30% of income, followed by food and household supplies at around 20%.
But what about the other debt? The good debt? The kind of debt that obedient, red-blooded Americans are socially encouraged to have? So they can live comfortable lives and land good jobs with good salaries? Though we already know that’s not a thing. But what about that debt?
We’re talking about things like mortgages, car loans, and student loans. Student loans being the thing we were told to take out by default for generations because it was the pathway to a better life. We can see how that pathway has ended for most of us now. And no, the education is not to blame, and in fact, education should be low-cost or even free because it’s pretty much the only thing that has a direct and easily measurable impact on increasing the overall economies of nations and the health of wellness of their people. But whatever.
Medical debt, which is uniquely American in that it doesn’t happen anywhere else. One in twelve American adults owes medical debt. Six percent of U.S. adults owe more than $1,000. People accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in debt even though they have insurance and their employer plans are supposed to cover things when they happen. But they don’t. Over 66% of all bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical debt. Again, this is not a thing we need to do to ourselves. It’s completely avoidable.
The last thing we need to talk about is the tick, tick, ticking, of the market. Is Captain Hook around? Don’t let him hear that ticking, he will lose it. Stocks are pretty much the main thing the news talks about when it comes to the economy. They talk about how trump gets so angry because the arrows are all red and pointing down anytime he opens his mouth, because he’s an idiot and has no idea how to manage a nation in any perceivable way. But do regular Americans care about this other than fanboying billionaires who own all the stock? Let’s find out.
How many Americans actually own stock? It’s higher than you’d think. It’s 62%. But that’s not really the full picture. The majority of that is all retirement plans that are long-term passive investments. 401ks and IRAs. Only 21% of American families directly hold stocks and do their own investing. 21%. The other thing to take into account is that most stocks in general are owned by the rich. The top 1% owns 50% of all stocks. And the top 10% owns 87% of all stocks. To flip that around, 90% of Americans are fighting for under 13% of all of the stock market. K. So one of the key economic indicators for “the economy” that all the legacy media reports on and that the government pushes only applies to the extraordinarily wealthy. 10% of all people, that’s who this is for. Cool.
Okay, so back to the real U.S. economy for real Americans. We don’t give a shit about the GDP. We care about household debt, living paycheck to paycheck, credit card interest rates and predatory loans, and the slave wages that we’re thrown as scraps from the billionaires’ tables. And those scraps will never get us out of any of this, and it wouldn’t even if we lived a hundred lifetimes. The wealth gap between what gets reported as the economy and the billionaires who benefit from that and these real numbers that go unreported and completely ignored and that affect the vast majority of real Americans, this is all just incredibly maddening.
And these real numbers that affect real people are the things we should be reporting on and hearing about. This is what should be on the news every single night. The stuff we should be tracking instead: the real unemployment rate, for one. How many people are truly unemployed, bringing back all the millions of people that the U.S. government just simply ignores. The real wages and salaries of the American people who are in the workforce. And the increase of those wages compared to inflation and the cost of goods over the years, in particular housing and groceries. Also compared to the income of the C-suite and billionaire class over the same time period. Lastly, the total debt of American households. And that’s made up of a number of things including predatory interest rates and average time to pay down debt, and debt vs income ratios for gainfully employed Americans, and those who aren’t employed. We have to keep track of this real data that affects real people. This is the stuff that should be plastered all over the media again and again, every day. Not the f*cking stock market or the GDP.
This is my Regular American Economic Landscape, or REAL Economy. Here it is: the real unemployment rate, compared wages and stagnation, the cost of goods, groceries and housing, and the utter drowning in piles of debt. Track those things. Report on those things. They matter. F*ck the billionaires, the CEOs, the nepo baby assholes who can’t even pay their taxes without complaining like they’re having their limbs taken off. Oh no, my new mega yacht. I’ll have to get the smaller, forty-bedroom one. Whatever, dude. Eff ‘em. They’re worthless. They represent the false economy and the economy of guilt and oppression and wage stagnation that’s kept the rest of us increasingly in their employ, doing their bidding, and fighting for their leftovers. Enough is enough. Let’s bring in the REAL economy. Let’s do some f*cking good while working with the real numbers instead.
I’ll see you in the next one.
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