 This isn't how it's supposed to be. You know, growing up we were told, you know, go to college, get a degree, work to support your family. Here we are. Do that. Now what? Now what? An increasing number of people on TikTok have been sharing stories of their survival in late-stage capitalist America, and I want to take some time to look at several of these videos and explain why things are still so bad for working Americans despite headlines claiming otherwise. Now I do want to go back to the woman that we just heard from. She's actually a nurse who went viral for telling her story on TikTok, and here's more from her. I feel like my husband and I are doing everything right. We both have good jobs. I'm a nurse. I'm a registered nurse who works full time. He works full time. We just got paid this past Friday, right? We paid the mortgage, bought some groceries, put some gas in the car, and guys, it is Tuesday, and we have like two or three hundred dollars to last us until next Friday, like we don't live in a big house. We live in a little ranch, it's eleven hundred square feet, three bedrooms, one bath, us and our two kids, and like I don't know what to do, like I'm in school full time, I work full time, he works more than full time, he works overtime every week, I don't know what to do, I'm so stressed out. Now her story is not uncommon, in fact 62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and it's now the main living style as CNBC reports, and 63% of Americans can't afford a $500 emergency, meaning you'll only be able to get by until you fall behind, but if her or her husband gets sick and misses work or they get a flat tire, or they have some sort of a medical emergency not covered by their insurance, they could fall into poverty, and once you fall into this hole, it's really hard to dig yourself out of it. It goes back to the famous Tezande tweet, being poor now just leads to being more poor later, can't pay to clean your teeth next year, pay for a root canal, can't pay for a new mattress next year, pay for back surgery, can't pay to get that lump checked out next year, pay for stage three cancer, poverty charges interest, and that's exactly correct. If it's an unexpected emergency, you might put the cost of that on a credit card or borrow money from a payday lender, and when you do these things, you begin to fall into debt if you don't have the money for these emergency expenses. So we're so this myth of meritocracy, where if you work really hard, you'll be successful, but that is demonstrably untrue, because even people who are successful by traditional standards are getting by the skin on their teeth, and it shouldn't be that way, right? Now, some people might argue that her, along with everyone else who's living paycheck to paycheck, well, they're at least getting by, and that is good in and of itself, it could always be worse, and that's true, but when you're working a full-time job, you shouldn't just barely get by in the richest country on earth. You should be able to save money, go on vacation, buy something nice for yourself once in a while. You shouldn't work yourself to death to only perpetually struggle forever. That's cruel, but there are people who did fall behind that aren't even getting by anymore like that nurse with the brand minimum, and these stories are becoming all too common now as well. Take this 24-year-old tiktoker, for example, who went viral documenting her experience being unhoused and living in her car. She gets ready in her car, she has to brush her teeth in a public bathroom, and as you can see, she says that she felt embarrassed when the lady was in there staring at her, and we often hear this myth from conservatives that unhoused people are lazy and they don't want to work, but she's working. She's still unhoused. She just doesn't make enough money to afford a place to stay, and wages aren't keeping up with inflation, and thankfully, inflation has come down, but it's still bad, and the cost of living rises every single year between one and three percent, and that's just then a typical year, because rent actually surged 15 percent during the first two years of the pandemic, and now, thankfully, it's increasing at a more stable rate as the Washington Post points out, but even though the cost of rent is increasing slower, it's still increasing. It increases one to three percent every single year, and it's still increasing following that 15 percent spike. This is why so many people face housing insecurity. Now just to give you some perspective, here's an ad for homes from the 1950s posted by Reddit user LuckyStrike85. You can buy a two-bedroom one-bath home for $7,450 with a monthly payment of $47.92, or a three-bedroom one-bath home for $7,900 with a monthly payment of $49.74. Now to put that in perspective, the OP points out that that's around $95,000 in today's value, and another user explains in 1950, the federal minimum wage was 75 cents an hour. That would cover one of these mortgage payments in about a week and a half at 40 hours per week. I live in an apartment making $22 an hour, and the only reason I can manage to cover rent in a similar timeframe is that my two roommates and I split the rent. Now there is a lot of generational animosity, rightfully so, because the boomers who were born into that economy voted it away by supporting neoliberal politicians for decades. And there's this idea that after boomers built up their wealth, they then took away those same opportunities from their children and then lambasted us for not being as successful as them, and they also call us lazy. And honestly, I'm not one to generalize all boomers, but if you know an older person who helped usher in the Reagan revolution, you largely can thank them for putting us on this current trajectory at least. But having said that though, boomers are not monolithic, not all of them supported Reagan, not all of them are responsible for this current situation. Many of them are powerless just as we are. And many of them are actually now suffering as a result of this late-stage capitalist economy that we find ourselves in. And regardless if they supported politicians that replaced their pensions with 401Ks or shifted the tax burden off of the rich and onto them, we are now on the cusp of a boomer catastrophe known as the Silver Tsunami. And this TikTok explains it well. Baby boomers are becoming homeless, and that's what's spending. Oh, and this is just getting started. I mean, it's even got its own nifty little name. Look at this, the Silver Tsunami. And what is the Silver Tsunami, you might ask? The Silver Tsunami refers to all of the aging boomers that are going to be of retirement age and are not going to be in the workforce. That means that they're not able to live off of anything but the retirement and Medicaid. Some estimates say that there's going to be 10,000 boomers turning 80 every single day. Every single day there's going to be 10,000 more retired people that need places to live. A lot of them are going to need assisted living with nurses to staff them. And by 20, 30, 73 million boomers will be of retirement age. And that doesn't mean all of them aren't going to be able to support themselves. But a lot of them are not going to be able to support themselves. And as a growing number of people need long-term care because life expectancy is getting longer and longer, that means that you're going to have more of these people staying in these places longer, meaning that there's going to be more money necessary to take care of them. And if not having enough houses was bad enough, there's a staffing shortage when it comes to nursing, especially for these people. Most nurses do not want senile old people to be sitting there yelling at them to take care of them. They don't get paid enough. They don't deserve that kind of disrespect. And they're just not for it. So not only do we have a lack of housing, we have a lack of nurses, and we have more people than ever reaching an age where they cannot take care of themselves. So, yes, we pick on boomers sometimes, but this shatters the idea that it's just young people suffering from late-stage capitalism. It's just not true. Boomers are suffering as well. And the question is, if this isn't addressed, what happens to all of these old people? Well, many of them will be forced to just keep working until they die. In fact, a Boston College study found that over 50% of working-age people won't be able to retire, which means they'll have to just keep working forever. And if they can't work, if they become disabled or senile or too old, well, then many will just become unhoused. And others will have to be taken care of by their family. Now go back to that first TikTok with the nurse who's living paycheck to paycheck. Imagine having to care for her parents. That's an extra mouth to feed. That's doctor's appointments that they're going to have to take her parents to. It's a bigger strain on families if you have to balance work in school and being a full-time caretaker for your parents too. It's a lot. It's a huge burden. And it doesn't have to be this way. But we were all told if we worked hard and put ourselves through school, and we'd be able to do things, we'd be able to get a job and live the American dream that we were promised. But that's just not true. It's to the point where Americans are being financially punished for even trying to pursue the American dream and better themselves. For example, listen to this TikTok or explain the scam that is student debt. I just checked my student loans because I needed to get the information to someone. And what the fuck? I started with 80,000. I have been paying for ten years. Last year I paid 6,000 lump sum because that's really the only way to get it low. That took it down to 76,000 after I've been paying for nine years. The grand total is I have paid $120,000 and I still owe 76. How the fuck is this possible? There's just no winning. And finally, after Biden announced that he'd cancel 10 to $20,000 of student debt, the Supreme Court took that away from us. And the same rich congresspeople who got their PPP loans forgiven, including interest, had the audacity to scold people like her for not being fiscally responsible enough. Now, these are just a couple of examples, but if you zoom out, you begin to see that our entire economy simply does not function well for ordinary Americans and it hasn't been this way for quite some time. But despite this, we're told the economy is doing amazing. Now, currently there are some good economic indicators, but that doesn't mean that everyone is doing good. But despite most people not really doing as well as they should be doing, given how much wealth is in this country, presidents still brag about the economy. Trump bragged about the pre-pandemic economy all the time and Biden is currently doing the same thing. He's bragging about Bidenomics and the economic recovery that he helped us written. Now, to be clear, he does deserve some credit. But here's why it feels like things are still getting worse, despite some changes to economic indicators. Jeff Stein of The Washington Post shared this chart. And as you can see, the people who are more likely to say that the economy is excellent now or good are richer, older, whiter, and they're more male. Meaning that not everyone is benefiting from economic gains. In fact, most people are not. And to be fair, this isn't just Biden's fault. The richest 748 Americans' other collective wealth increased by 77% thanks to Trump's 2017 tax cuts. And Oxfam reports that the richest 1% bagged nearly twice as much as literally everyone on the planet combined during the pandemic. Now, in an op-ed for Jacobin, Matt Brunig explains that working Americans aren't feeling the effects of the economy because Democrats let the pandemic-era policies expire. This includes the child tax credit. The pause on student debt expanded unemployment benefits, free school lunches, et cetera. Now, Brunig goes on to explain what we got out of the Biden administration, legislatively speaking, was a third tranche of COVID stimulus, an infrastructure bill, and a climate bill. There were a few tweaks here and there to welfare, state and labor market rules, but in general, the problems with those economic policy areas have gone unresolved. This is not because Biden never promised to do things in these areas, or because Biden made no effort. Biden supported and urged the taking up of the left's leading labor market reform demand, the Pro Union Pro Act. He also supported and tried to pass the Build Back Better legislation that would have made changes in various welfare policy areas, including family benefits and home care benefits. But these things did not pass. Under the usual canon of Democratic apologism, the left's disappointment at his failure is not supposed to be waved off by saying, actually, the economy is good, but instead by saying the cause of the failure is a handful of moderates in Congress, not Biden or the Democratic Party writ large. So this is why Bidenomics isn't landing. It feels tone deaf to just say that the economy is doing well when people are still struggling. So you're not gonna be able to convince people that the economy is good if they are still living paycheck to paycheck and their condition isn't improving. And there's this misconception that Trump is better on the economy simply because things happen to feel better economically when he was president, but the policies that he put in place greatly exacerbated income and wealth inequality and the things that Biden tried to put in place to mitigate that were thwarted by mansion and cinema. But rather than trying to convince people that the economy is good, I think that Biden needs to be honest. He needs to say that the economy is good. It's getting better, but there's still a lot of suffering going on. And if he's elected for a second term, he's gonna try to make it better. Now there's indications that Democrats are trying to tweak their economic message since just saying the economy is good hasn't been working. But I mean, if Trump's running on Make America Great Again, Biden should run on revive the American dream. That is something that I think could resonate with a lot of people. But until we get a president who is willing to make drastic changes to the economy and actually fight for the changes they're saying they wanna make, conditions for working class Americans are only going to continue to deteriorate. And that's what happens when all of the wealth is hoarded by a small group of elites. If you don't change that and redistribute wealth, things like this are going to continue to happen. People will continue to struggle. You know, you know this, you know this thing, thing. You're getting nervous, man.