There's a reason that no matter how many extra shifts you pick up, the number in your bank account at the end of the month looks about the same as it did last year. The paycheck grew a little. The rent grew more. The insurance premium went up again. The grocery bill, quietly, has been creeping north for eighteen straight months. You run harder and you stay in the same place, and eventually you start to wonder whether there's something wrong with you.
There isn't. The wheel just got faster.
What we're living through right now is the most sustained squeeze on working people since the 1970s, and the political class on both sides of the aisle has largely decided that talking about it plainly is too uncomfortable. So instead you get growth numbers. You get unemployment statistics at historic lows. You get quarterly earnings reports from companies that will make you genuinely angry if you let yourself think about what's in them.
The average American worker's real wage (what your paycheck actually buys, not what the number says) has gone up a combined nine percent since 1979. That's not nine percent per year. That's nine percent across nearly five decades. Meanwhile, productivity doubled. That gap between what workers produce and what they're paid is where a lot of people's frustration lives, even when they can't articulate it precisely.
The hamster wheel doesn't stop. It accelerates. And the conversation about why it does requires naming actual decisions made by actual people, not blaming the economy like it’s a weather pattern.