Housing costs are rising fastest in — Montana, Utah, and South Carolina? That must be some kind of joke, right? Sorry, there is no punchline. Only American families, getting punched in the gut. The economy is doing so well, why are Americans so pessimistic? I keep reading variations of this [Keep reading]
The $15 minimum wage battle cry always rang hollow to me. I know, $15 sounds like a lot to people who grew up in the 1970s or 80s (the minimum wage was $3.35 when I got my first job. Come to think of it, this would be a fun first [Keep reading]
More than a decade ago, I started writing a column on everyday consumer frustrations called The Red Tape Chronicles — my mailbag overflowed with rage. Piled high in my inbox every day were missives about mysterious late fees, overcharges, surprise interest rate hikes, and really all manner of sleazy, sneaky [Keep reading]
America’s housing market is crazy, which makes most Americans crazy. Fixing it would require something like 4 million new homes to drop out of the sky tomorrow. Or perhaps 7 million. And even that wouldn’t really restore the U.S. social contract with the middle class. If you really want to [Keep reading]
Is the long national inflation nightmare over? Well, that’s a $64 trillion question. Today brought news that the Consumer Price Index rate of increase was flat last month — the first pause in that measure of rising prices since 2020. Wall Street reacted to the news with predictable restraint and [Keep reading]
Americans are mad. They feel like they’re getting ripped off all the time — I’ve made a career chronicling this — but I don’t think they are quite sure who to be mad at. There’s a long list of culprits, but here’s one that’s often overlooked. Even people with good [Keep reading]
Two-thirds of all jobs in the country are low-paying at less than $20 an hour or $40,000 a year About 43% of households, or about 51 million, don’t earn enough to cover the basics. Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, or ALICE, is a worrisome group for America What’s the minimum amount of money you [Keep reading]
It’s an age-old question: Is life harder or easier for today’s young people? Well, score a “win” for the millennials. Younger adults are spending a stunning amount of money on rent — $93,000 by age 30, according to a new study. More important, rent sucks up about 45% of their [Keep reading]
If you think fake news is bad, wait until fake news video becomes a thing. Or until an entire generation of kids hacked by Silicon Valley’s attention-mining tools comes of age. Or until Facebook throws up its hands and realizes it simply can’t stop the Frankenstein it has created. We’re [Keep reading]
One of the themes of my Restless Project is that American consumers today are subject to major forces they can neither see, nor understand, nor plan for, and that’s a great source of day-to-day anxiety. Examples are all around us. Here’s one: Pew recently found that 46 percent of Americans [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan