November 24, 2025 • 23 mins
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A deep dive into how America’s basic participation costs—housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, and even staying connected—now consume incomes at levels unimaginable in 1963. Using the original poverty-line logic, a family of four needs nearly $140K just to break even, not thrive. Meanwhile, benefits cliffs trap working families as they try to climb the income ladder, causing many to end up worse off when they earn more. Chris exposes the broken math behind America’s affordability crisis.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watchdog-on-wall-street-with-chris-markowski/id570687608
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2PtgPvJvqc2gkpGIkNMR5i
WATCH and SUBSCRIBE on:
https://www.youtube.com/@WatchdogOnWallstreet/featured
A deep dive into how America’s basic participation costs—housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, and even staying connected—now consume incomes at levels unimaginable in 1963. Using the original poverty-line logic, a family of four needs nearly $140K just to break even, not thrive. Meanwhile, benefits cliffs trap working families as they try to climb the income ladder, causing many to end up worse off when they earn more. Chris exposes the broken math behind America’s affordability crisis.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Is the new poverty line, the real poverty line one
hundred and forty thousand dollars? There was a very very
interesting piece put out by Michael W. Green And I've
gone over his numbers and they look pretty good. Okay.
(00:40):
Might they be off a little bit and also depending
upon where you live in this country, absolutely, but you
take a look at the numbers that he has run, okay,
and they're pretty conservant. Yeah, povery line in the United States?
Should it be one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year? Like, oh,
(01:03):
it's crazy, okay, Okay. He took a look at the
poverty line and how it was originally calculated. The US
poverty line, Okay, when they started calculating this is calculated
as three times the cost of a minimum food diet
(01:26):
in nineteen sixty three, adjusted for inflation, three times the
minimum food budget. That's how we calculate the poverty line.
That's how the government does it. The formula was developed
by Amali Orshansky, an economists at the Social Security Administration
(01:49):
in nineteen sixty three. It's fascinating so he observed that
families spent roughly one third of their income on groceries,
since pricing data was hard to come by for many
items housing, If you could determine or calculate a minimum
adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply
by three and establish a poverty line. She was careful
(02:09):
about what she was measuring. In her January nineteen sixty
five articles, she presented the poverty thresholds as a measure
of income inadequacy, not income adequacy. If it's not possible
to state unequivocally how much is enough, it should be
possible to assert with confidence how much on average is
(02:32):
too little, Basically putting in a floor, a line which
families were clearly in crisis now nineteen sixty three, Her
Floory's made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. Family could rent
a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income.
(02:55):
Healthcare was provided by employers and costs relatively little. Blue
Cross coverage average ten dollars a month back then, childcare
didn't really exist as a market. Mothers stayed home, family
helped neighbors again, people watched each other's kids. Cars were affordable,
even if they were more prone to be breaking down
(03:15):
at that time. Local neighborhood kids kids in votech They
could fix problems around the house. College tuition could be
covered with a summer job retirement. At the times more
pensions rather than for one case. Now, the food times
(03:36):
three formula was a crisis threshold, a measure of two little.
It corresponded to reality. A family spending one third of
its income on food would spend the other two thirds
on everything else, and those proportions more or less worked.
Below that line, you were in a crisis situation. Above it,
(03:57):
you had a fighting chance. Changed between nineteen sixty three
and today. Housing costs exploded, healthcare became one of the
largest household expenses for many families. Employer covered shrink while
deductibles grew. Childcare all of a sudden became something, became
(04:17):
a market and very expensive. College went from affordable to crippling.
Transportation costs rose, labor models shifted. Second income, all of
a sudden became necessary, okay mandatory to maintain the standard
of living that one income formally provided. But this is
(04:43):
this is the ruse here, so pay close attention. You
have a second income, well, you gotta have the childcare.
Childcare meant you had to I was going to watch
your kids. So you also up two cars. Okay, Basically
you know, or you know, maybe you lived closer to
your parents than they helped out, whatever it may be.
(05:04):
The composition of household spending transformed, okay, and twenty twenty four,
food at home is no longer thirty three percent of
household spending for most families, it's five to seven percent.
Housing now consumes thirty five to forty five percent. Healthcare
takes fifteen to twenty five percent. Child care for families
(05:25):
with young children can eat twenty to forty percent. Now,
if you keep the same principle this Orshansky's logic, Basically,
the multiplier's not there. It's sixteen times, not three times.
Sixteen times. So if you measured income any inadequacy today
(05:48):
the way Orshansky measured it in nineteen sixty three, the
threshold for a family of four wouldn't be thirty one thousand,
two hundred. It would be somewhere between one hundred and
thirty and one hundred and fifty thousand, and again, Molly
Orshansky was only trying to find too little. She was
identifying crisis, not sufficiency. So basically, we'll put in the
(06:13):
middle one hundred and forty thousand dollars. What does that
tell you about the thirty one thousand, two hundred dollars
line that we still use. Basically, it tells you that
we are measuring starvation. Right now, the official poverty line
(06:33):
for family of four and twenty twenty four thirty one thousand,
two hundred. The median household income is roughly eighty thousand dollars. Okay,
so we're told that, Okay, someone family earning eighty thousand
dollars is doing fine, safely above poverty, solidly middle class,
maybe even comfortable. No, but if you're using the same
(06:58):
logic from nineteen sixty three, the same model eighty thousand dollars,
you'd actually be in poverty. Think about this. He puts together, Michael,
this article. He puts together a basic needs budget for
a family of four, two earners, two kids, not counting vacations,
(07:21):
no luxuries or anything like that. Okay, Basically, participation tickets
required to hold a job and raise kids twenty twenty four,
childcare thirty two thousand, seven hundred and seventy three dollars,
Housing twenty three thousand, two hundred and sixty seven, food
fourteen thousand, seven hundred and seventeen, transportation fourteen thousand, eight
(07:43):
hundred and twenty eight, healthcare ten thousand, five hundred and
sixty seven other essentials twenty one thousand, eight fifty seven.
Required net income one hundred and eighteen thousand and nine dollars.
Then again, you take into account federal state FIKA taxes,
that's eighteen thousand and five one hundred. You've got a
gross income of one hundred and thirty six thousand, five
(08:05):
one hundred. Okay, this is you're using the same formula,
same idea that they put together in nineteen sixty three.
That's the floor and again the single largest line item
it's not housing, it's childcare, and talks about this being
(08:31):
the trap you have. You know, the eighty eighty thousand
dollars income. Okay, I'm saying most American fav not all, okay,
but most require two earners to start to get to
that point in time. If one parent stays home. Okay,
the income drops to let's say fifty thousand. Okay, that's
not enough. Both parents work to hit one hundred thousand, Well,
(08:54):
you got to hand over thirty two thousand plus to
the daycare center. So the second earner is not you know,
looking to pay for a vacation or a boat is
basically most of the money is going to pay a
stranger to watch the kids, so you can make an
extra you know, two thousand bucks a month. Get it
(09:16):
now again, he says here, So well, all people are
going to say, oh, I'm cherry picking expensive cities. They say,
one hundred and thirty six thousand, five hundred is a
number for San Francisco or Manhattan, not real America. Well,
the model that he puts together allocates twenty three thousand,
two hundred and sixty seven dollars per year for housing.
(09:37):
That breaks down to one thousand, nine hundred and thirty
eight dollars a month. That's the number that they're say
that you're doing just fine. M He did a piece
where he went to you know, Caldwell, New Jersey, which
was a place where you know, a team's could afford
(10:00):
to live back in the nineteen fifties and the sixties
went on zillow to see what a cost to live
in that same town if you don't have a down
payment and are forced to rent. They're exactly seven two
bedroom units available in the entire town. The cheapest one
rents for two thousand, seven hundred and fifteen dollars a month. Wow,
(10:25):
that's a seven hundred and seventy seven dollars gap between
the model and the reality. Ninety three hundred a year
in post tax money. Okay, you got an earn additional
twelve to thirteen thousand dollars to afford that. So his
point is is that as one hundred and forty thousand
dollars number is conservative, he's being optimistic. And again, you
(10:50):
plug in certain zip codes, certain areas of the country,
you know, you can get up to one hundred and
sixty thousand dollars. The market's not just expensive, it's broken.
It's broken. And one of the other things that we
hear as well from again economis economists out there talking
about you know, ah, you know, you look at how
(11:14):
much better everything is at one hundred and forty thousand dollars. Okay, ah, jeez.
The improvement and equality of life. Okay. For example, they'll say, okay,
you can't compare a nineteen fifty five car nineteen sixty
three car to a car today, because today's cars have
(11:34):
airbags and air conditioning. And the phones you use today
compared to the ones used back then are essentially supercomputers.
And that's true, they are. Okay, but you're you're pricing
things in wrong. You're making a category error when you
(11:56):
think that way. You're not calculating the price of a luxury.
You're calculating an entry ticket, Okay. Basically the price to
participate in our economy. To function in nineteen fifty five society,
to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen,
(12:18):
you need a telephone line five dollars a month. Let's
adjust for standard inflation fifty eight dollars today. Right, you
can't run a household today on a fifty eight dollars landline. Okay. Well,
(12:40):
you got to have two factor authentication for your bank accounts,
We got to answer work emails, check on your your
kids school portal, everything like that. You have to have one. Okay,
you have to have one, and you've got to pay
for it. That's what two hundred bucks a month. Well,
(13:03):
all said and done, But again you'll get an economist,
so well, you know, we'll got all the got all
the power that you have. Look at the computing power
you have. Oh it's amazing. Okay, well what is the
computing power you actually need? It makes the point, it's genius. Actually,
(13:24):
the utility I'm buying is connection to the economy. The
price of that utility just didn't just keep pace with inflation,
it tripled relative to it. Now you have a participation
audit across the entire nineteen fifty five budget. Okay, nask
(13:47):
is the car better? I said? I asked what does
it cost to get to work? Healthcare? Nineteen fifty five,
Blue Cross family coverage was roughly ten dollars a month
one hundred and fifteen dollars in today's money. Today, the
average family premium is over sixteen hundred dollars a month.
That's fourteen times inflation. Fight A taxes. Yeah, nineteen fifty
(14:08):
five Solid Security taxes two percent On the first forty
two hundred dollars of income. The maximum annual contribution was
eighty four bucks. Adjusted for inflation, that's about nine hundred
and sixty dollars a year. Today, a family earning eighty
thousand dollars pays over sixty one hundred dollars. That's six
(14:29):
times inflation. Childcare nineteen fifty five basically zero Okay, the
economy supported a single earner model. Now it's thirty two grand. Okay,
So that's an infinite increase in the cost of participation, food,
(14:51):
con track that everything else. The inescapable fee is required
to hold a job, stay healthy, raise children inflated at
multiples of the official rate when considered on participation. Okay,
without a doubt. Are all of these things goods and services?
Are they better? Okay? Now, I'm not going to want
to trade my flat screen TV in or my iPhone
(15:14):
in for a model from back at that point in time,
But again, you don't have a choice either. That's the point. Now.
The issue we have here, and I've talked about this before,
is how we structure things in society. You talk about
labor participation and why labor participations so we can people
(15:35):
get get their arms around that. The safety net that
we have in this country, Okay, we have it there.
We're supposed to catch people at the bottom. Right Again,
we want to help people out, but it makes it
very difficult for people trying to climb out. As income
rises from forty thousand to one hundred thousand, benefits disappear faster.
(16:00):
Then wages increase. Now thirty five thousand dollars. Okay, family
is struggling. Family four is definitely struggling. State provides a floor,
You get Medicaid, you get snap heavy childcare subsidies. Okay,
the deficits are real, but capped. Okay. Then you get
(16:22):
to forty five thousand dollars, family earns gets it makes
ten thousand dollars more. Is that good news? Well, at
that point in time, parents lose Medicaid eligibility. Suddenly they
got to pay premiums and deductibles. So you gain ten
thousand dollars and income, your expenses increase over ten thousand,
(16:43):
five hundred and sixty seven dollars, was his calculation. You're
basically poorer than before, so the effective tax on your
ten thousand dollars raise is over one hundred percent. Then, well,
you work harder, you get to sixty five thousand dollars.
Now you're they're called working class. Okay, but at this level,
(17:06):
childcare subsidies vanished. Now must pay the full market rate
for daycare income game twenty thousand dollars from forty five thousand,
expense increase about twenty eight thousand dollars going backwards, going backwards.
(17:26):
I'm using the numbers he came up here. Essentially, a
family earning one hundred thousand dollars is effectively in a
worse monthly financial position than a family earning forty thousand dollars.
At forty thousand dollars, says the family is drowning, but
the state gives you a life vest. At one hundred
thousand dollars, you are drowning, but the state says you
(17:50):
are a high earner and ties an anchor to your
ankle called market price. So basically, you want to talk
about it in terms of options. The government has sold
a call option to the poor, but they've rigged the gamma.
As you move closer to the money self sufficiency, the
(18:10):
delta collapses. For every dollar of effort you put in,
the system confiscates seventy to one hundred cents. Now, if
you were a trader, this was an investment thing, would
you make that trade? And you wonder why? You know,
we wonder why sometimes why some of this labor force
(18:31):
participation lags, and I've talked about this before in certain states,
the various different aid that they put out and the
donut holes and the issues that it causes. Again, an
excellent piece, Okay, And it goes on in a myriad
of different other things. Like I said, I've looked at
some of the numbers. You know, some may scream out
(18:53):
it's too high for childcare and get whatever it may be.
I think you get the point. They get the point.
And this has been getting progressively worse, uh in this country,
without a doubt. With that, without a doubt, And we've
been beating this drum for some time. You know. It
was interesting. There was a meeting of the minds at
(19:16):
the White House on Friday, had Trump and Mam Dommi,
uh man Donnie meet there and uh uh I got
a lot of little emails, snarky emails from people out
there making jokes in regards to this meeting. Yeah. They
both wanted to bring prices down, and Trump says he
hopes he's going to do well. We need we need
(19:42):
more capitalism, less government in order to get the country
moving and grooving again. We really do, you know, Ma'm
Dommy's ideas that they're they're not gonna work. What we're
doing right now as a country in regards to the
(20:05):
regulatory capture regulation, all of the hoops and everything that
everyone has to go through, the high taxes that we
have to pay here, making it very very difficult. And again,
when you lose that much buying power and you take
a look at these numbers and what people have to
spend even to participate, it gives you a different kind
(20:25):
of outlook on what's really going on out there and
how difficult it is. Families are going to need to really,
you know again, have to stick together, have to stick
together to kind of work your way through this this reality. Again.
You know, I throw it out to everyone out there
(20:45):
to challenge, you know, some of the numbers or push
back you know, on some of this. And again I
can hear it. I know I'm gonna go, oh, you know,
healthcare as much, but I understand that I get all that.
It's it's so ridiculous, it's so bad. We all know
that the healthcare system now is horrible here in this country.
(21:08):
We all know what we have to pay. I can't
even get around. I mean, I'm constantly you know, I've
got insurance, I've got high double, i got health save account,
all this stuff. You know, I'm constantly getting bills in me.
I can't even keep track of what's been paid, what's
out the door. It's crazy. So it's got to hire
a full time account just to handle your own health care. Okay,
this is what we have. This is what people have
(21:30):
to deal with. Again, what we've done to food here
in the United States and how expensive food costs are.
It's nonsensical as figuring out the other day, you know,
somebody was talking about the fact they get although they
talk about the meat packas here in the United States,
they're almost all owned by Blackstone. Different companies, but owned
(21:51):
by Blackstone. These are the type of processes that I've
warned about going back to when they repeal Glass Stegel
the end of the Clinton administration, pushed forward by both
Democrats and Republicans, where Wall Street owning entire processes. We
can go back to part of the oil problems back
(22:13):
in the day, actually containers owning where the storage was.
He can go back to all of these things, to
corner market, to Enron, and it's we the people that
are always getting hit on these things again. Pre market capitalists,
(22:33):
simple straight rules. We have to do everything in our
power to get the cost of living down here in
the United States. And Trump had some good ideas in
his first term. He had some excellent ideas in the
first his Republican platform going back to twenty sixteen. Now,
(22:57):
I don't know. You tell me a lot of meetings
with CEOs on a regular basis, in the same way
Obama had a lot of meetings with CEOs or Biden
had a lot of meetings with CEOs. Why what the
CEOs do? What the CEOs are going to do? Why
don't you just go out there and allow business to
(23:17):
be had. Don't allow them to continue to get larger
with various different special deals in public private partnerships and
all this other crap. Okay, because it's not working. Not working, okay.
Affordability crisis is that they're throwing that term around all
the time. Don't tell me it's not real. Watchdog on
(23:37):
Wall Street dot Com
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Is the new poverty line, the real poverty line one
hundred and forty thousand dollars? There was a very very
interesting piece put out by Michael W. Green And I've
gone over his numbers and they look pretty good. Okay.
(00:40):
Might they be off a little bit and also depending
upon where you live in this country, absolutely, but you
take a look at the numbers that he has run, okay,
and they're pretty conservant. Yeah, povery line in the United States?
Should it be one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year? Like, oh,
(01:03):
it's crazy, okay, Okay. He took a look at the
poverty line and how it was originally calculated. The US
poverty line, Okay, when they started calculating this is calculated
as three times the cost of a minimum food diet
(01:26):
in nineteen sixty three, adjusted for inflation, three times the
minimum food budget. That's how we calculate the poverty line.
That's how the government does it. The formula was developed
by Amali Orshansky, an economists at the Social Security Administration
(01:49):
in nineteen sixty three. It's fascinating so he observed that
families spent roughly one third of their income on groceries,
since pricing data was hard to come by for many
items housing, If you could determine or calculate a minimum
adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply
by three and establish a poverty line. She was careful
(02:09):
about what she was measuring. In her January nineteen sixty
five articles, she presented the poverty thresholds as a measure
of income inadequacy, not income adequacy. If it's not possible
to state unequivocally how much is enough, it should be
possible to assert with confidence how much on average is
(02:32):
too little, Basically putting in a floor, a line which
families were clearly in crisis now nineteen sixty three, Her
Floory's made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. Family could rent
a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income.
(02:55):
Healthcare was provided by employers and costs relatively little. Blue
Cross coverage average ten dollars a month back then, childcare
didn't really exist as a market. Mothers stayed home, family
helped neighbors again, people watched each other's kids. Cars were affordable,
even if they were more prone to be breaking down
(03:15):
at that time. Local neighborhood kids kids in votech They
could fix problems around the house. College tuition could be
covered with a summer job retirement. At the times more
pensions rather than for one case. Now, the food times
(03:36):
three formula was a crisis threshold, a measure of two little.
It corresponded to reality. A family spending one third of
its income on food would spend the other two thirds
on everything else, and those proportions more or less worked.
Below that line, you were in a crisis situation. Above it,
(03:57):
you had a fighting chance. Changed between nineteen sixty three
and today. Housing costs exploded, healthcare became one of the
largest household expenses for many families. Employer covered shrink while
deductibles grew. Childcare all of a sudden became something, became
(04:17):
a market and very expensive. College went from affordable to crippling.
Transportation costs rose, labor models shifted. Second income, all of
a sudden became necessary, okay mandatory to maintain the standard
of living that one income formally provided. But this is
(04:43):
this is the ruse here, so pay close attention. You
have a second income, well, you gotta have the childcare.
Childcare meant you had to I was going to watch
your kids. So you also up two cars. Okay, Basically
you know, or you know, maybe you lived closer to
your parents than they helped out, whatever it may be.
(05:04):
The composition of household spending transformed, okay, and twenty twenty four,
food at home is no longer thirty three percent of
household spending for most families, it's five to seven percent.
Housing now consumes thirty five to forty five percent. Healthcare
takes fifteen to twenty five percent. Child care for families
(05:25):
with young children can eat twenty to forty percent. Now,
if you keep the same principle this Orshansky's logic, Basically,
the multiplier's not there. It's sixteen times, not three times.
Sixteen times. So if you measured income any inadequacy today
(05:48):
the way Orshansky measured it in nineteen sixty three, the
threshold for a family of four wouldn't be thirty one thousand,
two hundred. It would be somewhere between one hundred and
thirty and one hundred and fifty thousand, and again, Molly
Orshansky was only trying to find too little. She was
identifying crisis, not sufficiency. So basically, we'll put in the
(06:13):
middle one hundred and forty thousand dollars. What does that
tell you about the thirty one thousand, two hundred dollars
line that we still use. Basically, it tells you that
we are measuring starvation. Right now, the official poverty line
(06:33):
for family of four and twenty twenty four thirty one thousand,
two hundred. The median household income is roughly eighty thousand dollars. Okay,
so we're told that, Okay, someone family earning eighty thousand
dollars is doing fine, safely above poverty, solidly middle class,
maybe even comfortable. No, but if you're using the same
(06:58):
logic from nineteen sixty three, the same model eighty thousand dollars,
you'd actually be in poverty. Think about this. He puts together, Michael,
this article. He puts together a basic needs budget for
a family of four, two earners, two kids, not counting vacations,
(07:21):
no luxuries or anything like that. Okay, Basically, participation tickets
required to hold a job and raise kids twenty twenty four,
childcare thirty two thousand, seven hundred and seventy three dollars,
Housing twenty three thousand, two hundred and sixty seven, food
fourteen thousand, seven hundred and seventeen, transportation fourteen thousand, eight
(07:43):
hundred and twenty eight, healthcare ten thousand, five hundred and
sixty seven other essentials twenty one thousand, eight fifty seven.
Required net income one hundred and eighteen thousand and nine dollars.
Then again, you take into account federal state FIKA taxes,
that's eighteen thousand and five one hundred. You've got a
gross income of one hundred and thirty six thousand, five
(08:05):
one hundred. Okay, this is you're using the same formula,
same idea that they put together in nineteen sixty three.
That's the floor and again the single largest line item
it's not housing, it's childcare, and talks about this being
(08:31):
the trap you have. You know, the eighty eighty thousand
dollars income. Okay, I'm saying most American fav not all, okay,
but most require two earners to start to get to
that point in time. If one parent stays home. Okay,
the income drops to let's say fifty thousand. Okay, that's
not enough. Both parents work to hit one hundred thousand, Well,
(08:54):
you got to hand over thirty two thousand plus to
the daycare center. So the second earner is not you know,
looking to pay for a vacation or a boat is
basically most of the money is going to pay a
stranger to watch the kids, so you can make an
extra you know, two thousand bucks a month. Get it
(09:16):
now again, he says here, So well, all people are
going to say, oh, I'm cherry picking expensive cities. They say,
one hundred and thirty six thousand, five hundred is a
number for San Francisco or Manhattan, not real America. Well,
the model that he puts together allocates twenty three thousand,
two hundred and sixty seven dollars per year for housing.
(09:37):
That breaks down to one thousand, nine hundred and thirty
eight dollars a month. That's the number that they're say
that you're doing just fine. M He did a piece
where he went to you know, Caldwell, New Jersey, which
was a place where you know, a team's could afford
(10:00):
to live back in the nineteen fifties and the sixties
went on zillow to see what a cost to live
in that same town if you don't have a down
payment and are forced to rent. They're exactly seven two
bedroom units available in the entire town. The cheapest one
rents for two thousand, seven hundred and fifteen dollars a month. Wow,
(10:25):
that's a seven hundred and seventy seven dollars gap between
the model and the reality. Ninety three hundred a year
in post tax money. Okay, you got an earn additional
twelve to thirteen thousand dollars to afford that. So his
point is is that as one hundred and forty thousand
dollars number is conservative, he's being optimistic. And again, you
(10:50):
plug in certain zip codes, certain areas of the country,
you know, you can get up to one hundred and
sixty thousand dollars. The market's not just expensive, it's broken.
It's broken. And one of the other things that we
hear as well from again economis economists out there talking
about you know, ah, you know, you look at how
(11:14):
much better everything is at one hundred and forty thousand dollars. Okay, ah, jeez.
The improvement and equality of life. Okay. For example, they'll say, okay,
you can't compare a nineteen fifty five car nineteen sixty
three car to a car today, because today's cars have
(11:34):
airbags and air conditioning. And the phones you use today
compared to the ones used back then are essentially supercomputers.
And that's true, they are. Okay, but you're you're pricing
things in wrong. You're making a category error when you
(11:56):
think that way. You're not calculating the price of a luxury.
You're calculating an entry ticket, Okay. Basically the price to
participate in our economy. To function in nineteen fifty five society,
to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen,
(12:18):
you need a telephone line five dollars a month. Let's
adjust for standard inflation fifty eight dollars today. Right, you
can't run a household today on a fifty eight dollars landline. Okay. Well,
(12:40):
you got to have two factor authentication for your bank accounts,
We got to answer work emails, check on your your
kids school portal, everything like that. You have to have one. Okay,
you have to have one, and you've got to pay
for it. That's what two hundred bucks a month. Well,
(13:03):
all said and done, But again you'll get an economist,
so well, you know, we'll got all the got all
the power that you have. Look at the computing power
you have. Oh it's amazing. Okay, well what is the
computing power you actually need? It makes the point, it's genius. Actually,
(13:24):
the utility I'm buying is connection to the economy. The
price of that utility just didn't just keep pace with inflation,
it tripled relative to it. Now you have a participation
audit across the entire nineteen fifty five budget. Okay, nask
(13:47):
is the car better? I said? I asked what does
it cost to get to work? Healthcare? Nineteen fifty five,
Blue Cross family coverage was roughly ten dollars a month
one hundred and fifteen dollars in today's money. Today, the
average family premium is over sixteen hundred dollars a month.
That's fourteen times inflation. Fight A taxes. Yeah, nineteen fifty
(14:08):
five Solid Security taxes two percent On the first forty
two hundred dollars of income. The maximum annual contribution was
eighty four bucks. Adjusted for inflation, that's about nine hundred
and sixty dollars a year. Today, a family earning eighty
thousand dollars pays over sixty one hundred dollars. That's six
(14:29):
times inflation. Childcare nineteen fifty five basically zero Okay, the
economy supported a single earner model. Now it's thirty two grand. Okay,
So that's an infinite increase in the cost of participation, food,
(14:51):
con track that everything else. The inescapable fee is required
to hold a job, stay healthy, raise children inflated at
multiples of the official rate when considered on participation. Okay,
without a doubt. Are all of these things goods and services?
Are they better? Okay? Now, I'm not going to want
to trade my flat screen TV in or my iPhone
(15:14):
in for a model from back at that point in time,
But again, you don't have a choice either. That's the point. Now.
The issue we have here, and I've talked about this before,
is how we structure things in society. You talk about
labor participation and why labor participations so we can people
(15:35):
get get their arms around that. The safety net that
we have in this country, Okay, we have it there.
We're supposed to catch people at the bottom. Right Again,
we want to help people out, but it makes it
very difficult for people trying to climb out. As income
rises from forty thousand to one hundred thousand, benefits disappear faster.
(16:00):
Then wages increase. Now thirty five thousand dollars. Okay, family
is struggling. Family four is definitely struggling. State provides a floor,
You get Medicaid, you get snap heavy childcare subsidies. Okay,
the deficits are real, but capped. Okay. Then you get
(16:22):
to forty five thousand dollars, family earns gets it makes
ten thousand dollars more. Is that good news? Well, at
that point in time, parents lose Medicaid eligibility. Suddenly they
got to pay premiums and deductibles. So you gain ten
thousand dollars and income, your expenses increase over ten thousand,
(16:43):
five hundred and sixty seven dollars, was his calculation. You're
basically poorer than before, so the effective tax on your
ten thousand dollars raise is over one hundred percent. Then, well,
you work harder, you get to sixty five thousand dollars.
Now you're they're called working class. Okay, but at this level,
(17:06):
childcare subsidies vanished. Now must pay the full market rate
for daycare income game twenty thousand dollars from forty five thousand,
expense increase about twenty eight thousand dollars going backwards, going backwards.
(17:26):
I'm using the numbers he came up here. Essentially, a
family earning one hundred thousand dollars is effectively in a
worse monthly financial position than a family earning forty thousand dollars.
At forty thousand dollars, says the family is drowning, but
the state gives you a life vest. At one hundred
thousand dollars, you are drowning, but the state says you
(17:50):
are a high earner and ties an anchor to your
ankle called market price. So basically, you want to talk
about it in terms of options. The government has sold
a call option to the poor, but they've rigged the gamma.
As you move closer to the money self sufficiency, the
(18:10):
delta collapses. For every dollar of effort you put in,
the system confiscates seventy to one hundred cents. Now, if
you were a trader, this was an investment thing, would
you make that trade? And you wonder why? You know,
we wonder why sometimes why some of this labor force
(18:31):
participation lags, and I've talked about this before in certain states,
the various different aid that they put out and the
donut holes and the issues that it causes. Again, an
excellent piece, Okay, And it goes on in a myriad
of different other things. Like I said, I've looked at
some of the numbers. You know, some may scream out
(18:53):
it's too high for childcare and get whatever it may be.
I think you get the point. They get the point.
And this has been getting progressively worse, uh in this country,
without a doubt. With that, without a doubt, And we've
been beating this drum for some time. You know. It
was interesting. There was a meeting of the minds at
(19:16):
the White House on Friday, had Trump and Mam Dommi,
uh man Donnie meet there and uh uh I got
a lot of little emails, snarky emails from people out
there making jokes in regards to this meeting. Yeah. They
both wanted to bring prices down, and Trump says he
hopes he's going to do well. We need we need
(19:42):
more capitalism, less government in order to get the country
moving and grooving again. We really do, you know, Ma'm
Dommy's ideas that they're they're not gonna work. What we're
doing right now as a country in regards to the
(20:05):
regulatory capture regulation, all of the hoops and everything that
everyone has to go through, the high taxes that we
have to pay here, making it very very difficult. And again,
when you lose that much buying power and you take
a look at these numbers and what people have to
spend even to participate, it gives you a different kind
(20:25):
of outlook on what's really going on out there and
how difficult it is. Families are going to need to really,
you know again, have to stick together, have to stick
together to kind of work your way through this this reality. Again.
You know, I throw it out to everyone out there
(20:45):
to challenge, you know, some of the numbers or push
back you know, on some of this. And again I
can hear it. I know I'm gonna go, oh, you know,
healthcare as much, but I understand that I get all that.
It's it's so ridiculous, it's so bad. We all know
that the healthcare system now is horrible here in this country.
(21:08):
We all know what we have to pay. I can't
even get around. I mean, I'm constantly you know, I've
got insurance, I've got high double, i got health save account,
all this stuff. You know, I'm constantly getting bills in me.
I can't even keep track of what's been paid, what's
out the door. It's crazy. So it's got to hire
a full time account just to handle your own health care. Okay,
this is what we have. This is what people have
(21:30):
to deal with. Again, what we've done to food here
in the United States and how expensive food costs are.
It's nonsensical as figuring out the other day, you know,
somebody was talking about the fact they get although they
talk about the meat packas here in the United States,
they're almost all owned by Blackstone. Different companies, but owned
(21:51):
by Blackstone. These are the type of processes that I've
warned about going back to when they repeal Glass Stegel
the end of the Clinton administration, pushed forward by both
Democrats and Republicans, where Wall Street owning entire processes. We
can go back to part of the oil problems back
(22:13):
in the day, actually containers owning where the storage was.
He can go back to all of these things, to
corner market, to Enron, and it's we the people that
are always getting hit on these things again. Pre market capitalists,
(22:33):
simple straight rules. We have to do everything in our
power to get the cost of living down here in
the United States. And Trump had some good ideas in
his first term. He had some excellent ideas in the
first his Republican platform going back to twenty sixteen. Now,
(22:57):
I don't know. You tell me a lot of meetings
with CEOs on a regular basis, in the same way
Obama had a lot of meetings with CEOs or Biden
had a lot of meetings with CEOs. Why what the
CEOs do? What the CEOs are going to do? Why
don't you just go out there and allow business to
(23:17):
be had. Don't allow them to continue to get larger
with various different special deals in public private partnerships and
all this other crap. Okay, because it's not working. Not working, okay.
Affordability crisis is that they're throwing that term around all
the time. Don't tell me it's not real. Watchdog on
(23:37):
Wall Street dot Com
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