middleclassparty

Older generations say “we all struggled in our 20s.” No, you didn’t. You didn’t pay $2,200 for rent and $7 for eggs. You didn’t graduate into $50K student debt and $0 job security. Gen Z isn’t dramatic. They’re drowning.

The people who built this country's freedom are living inside its collapse. Veterans are facing the same broken job market as everyone else. The same unaffordable housing. The same medical system that sends $108,000 bills for 20 minute surgeries. The same grocery stores where $73 barely fills a bag. The same gas prices up 52% in three months. Except they came home from war to face all of it. Honor the fallen today. Then get angry enough to change what they came home to.

Today we thank veterans for their service. Here is what that service gets you in America in 2026. Thousands of VA doctors and nurses were fired this year. A nurse and a manufacturing tech who both served cannot afford rent together. We fire million dollar missiles to shoot down $20,000 drones in the Middle East. We write blank checks to the military industrial complex. And we can't house the people who came home. You want to support our veterans? Stop voting for the people doing this to them.

How did we get here? It started with trickle down economics that never trickled. Then stock buybacks were legalized so executives got bonuses instead of workers getting raises. Then pensions were replaced with 401ks nobody knew how to use. Then jobs were shipped overseas. Then predatory lending crashed the housing market in 2008. Then taxpayers bailed out the banks. Then the banks and wealthy bought all the foreclosed homes at the bottom. That is when rent started climbing. Then we had the big print during Covid...which continues. Every single step was a policy decision. The middle class did not die of natural causes. It was dismantled piece by piece over 45 years.

“Just move somewhere cheaper” is horrible advice. Cheaper doesn’t exist. Everywhere “affordable” is already full of people who fled somewhere else. You’re not bad with money. America is bad at letting you live.

America is about to have its first trillionaire. The average American makes $66,000 a year. One in four lives paycheck to paycheck. It costs $159,000 a year just to live comfortably. That's not a gap. That's a canyon.

In 1929 a home cost three times the average worker's wage. Today a home costs eight times the average worker's wage. In 1929 that ratio triggered the Great Depression. Today we call it a healthy real estate market. The wage did not move. The goalposts did.

We are in a depression right now. The only reason it's not called that is because the wealthy have never been richer. They are doing fantastic. But for the working class it is exactly what a depression feels like. The definition of a depression did not change. The people writing the definition did.

Two items at Target. Shampoo and razor heads. $30. Basic hygiene is now a financial decision in America. Not a vacation. Not a dinner out. Not a luxury. Shampoo and a razor. And the people in charge are still telling working Americans they just need to spend smarter.

Everyone says rent went up because of inflation. That is backwards. Rent is not reacting to inflation. Rent is creating it. Landlords raising rent 10% a year on millions of units. No improvements. No justification. Just because they can. And because working people have nowhere else to go. Nobody in power has proposed a single meaningful solution. Because the people in power are the landlords.

Boomers: I fed a family of four on $50 a week. Gen Z: $50 barely covers lunch. This isn’t inflation. It’s engineered poverty.

Panicking at the grocery store every week is normal now. Working full time and barely surviving is normal now. Skipping Christmas gifts because existing costs too much is normal now. Putting things back at the register is normal now. Crying in your car over a grocery bill is normal now. The most dangerous thing that has happened to this country is not the collapse itself. It's that the middle class stopped calling it a crisis. And started calling it life.

The Fed is talking. The CEOs are talking. Wall Street analysts are talking. Politicians are talking. The only voice nobody hears is the working American holding the entire country up.