President Trump and Congress are neither investing in long-term solutions nor offering short-term relief. If they paid attention to different indicators of Americans’ financial health, beyond top-line growth and other traditional measures of economic success, they might feel more urgency.
So we developed one: a model budget for a family of two parents and two children under 8. We set their annual income at $130,000 — well above the roughly $83,500 national median for all U.S. households, and right in the middle of the income distribution for a family of four.
According to our calculations, the math has stopped adding up for this family over the past 18 months. They had a small cushion in 2024. Now they are in the red after covering just the basics, such as housing, an Affordable Care Act marketplace health care plan and day care. The family has over $1,000 less than it did a year and a half ago. Rising costs have more than wiped out any gains from higher wages and recent tax cuts.
This family would have trouble paying for anything beyond the basics — say, a car breaking down or a kid breaking an arm. It could not budget for any of the things that a typical family might hope for: buying a new car, taking a summer vacation or welcoming a third child.
To mount an effective response, it helps to know what stresses Americans feel most sharply and what action they expect from their elected officials. So we asked people.
By almost four to one, Americans told us that rising prices, rather than paychecks that haven’t kept up, are driving a cost-of-living squeeze. Two-thirds say they are struggling today and need relief they can feel right away. And the most cited concern is grocery costs. Some 35 percent of Americans in our survey, which we conducted last month, identified food as the single biggest source of financial pressure — approximately 15 percentage points higher than the share who named housing, the second-most-chosen option.
Several things are going on here:
First, kids, and in particular small children, are incredibly expensive in this country, because the Bible says that it’s wrong to take money from the rich to help pay the child care costs of ordinary people.
Only slightly less facetiously, I read a piece somewhere recently in which a partner at a big law firm told a woman associate that he considered choosing to have a child like choosing to go on a round the world sailing trip, that is, an act of extraordinarily extravagant consumption. It’s a real mystery why birth rates are now well below replacement level in any country where women have any economic and social freedom.
Second, it’s really hard psychologically to adjust for inflation, especially for older people as I know from experience. $130,000 per year sounds like a really big income to me because 30 years ago it WAS a really big income (equivalent to $282,000 today). But now it’s only the median income for families of four. We’ve discussed the psychology of inflation quite a bit at LGM, and it’s a difficult political issue for all sorts of reasons.
Third, a bunch of expenses that are very heavily subsidized or socialized altogether in the developed world — child care especially, but also health care and higher education — aren’t in the US, because of the Bible and Confederate Jesus and Elon Musk.
Fourth, and related, even people with moderate to quite high incomes in the US are laboring under the constant and growing pressures of economic precarity, because of the Bible etc.
Fifth, housing costs vary wildly across the country, so $130K per year for a family with two young kids might be plenty of money in Ashtabula, but barely middle class in Pasadena (of course you’re living in Pasadena rather than Ashtabula but this is in many cases not really anything like an actual choice given where the jobs that pay that kind of money are).
Sixth, the Bible.
There’s also some interesting discussion in the piece about how the price of meat in particular is a huge burden for many people, which is a problem that has at least a superficially obvious solution, but I’m pretty sure the right to bear cheeseburgers is somewhere in the Constitution so maybe not.
Googled something about quick hydration and it suggested big jug of water, couple tbsp pickle juice, dash of lime juice.
Its surprisingly tasty????
Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There’s some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
Richard Nixon throws up his hands in exasperation as he addresses the press: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,” he says in the 1973 clip. “Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
Suddenly, rapper EsDeeKid’s song “Rottweiler” comes in at full blast.
Okay, yo, ayy Too much snow, kid, coming like Canada Got kush smoke all in me lungs, I’m running from plod, but I’m lacking the stamina
More Nixon clips flood in. He chuckles, salutes, and waves merrily to the crowd. In one snippet, he’s swallowed by a crowd of fans. The words “I’m not a crook” flash across the screen. His face lights up with an X-ray filter before the seal of the Richard Nixon Foundation shines on the screen.
The caption reads: “The people have got to know.” The reel, shown below, has been seen over 1.4 million times and shared by thousands of people.
And….
The Foundation appears to at least tacitly go along with this popular rebrand. Tim Naftali, who served as the first federal director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, says that the Foundation has long embraced a conspiratorial view of Watergate, but it’s taken several decades before they could spread their theories to people who may not know of Nixon at all.
“At the time I was the Nixon Library director, they were making the same arguments,” says Naftali. “They’re not new, but they found a new platform, and they’ve found a new audience.”
During his tenure from 2007 to 2011, Naftali oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of documents, nearly 700 hours of Nixon tapes, and the creation of the Watergate Gallery. For years, he has been vocal about the pushback he encountered when trying to erect the exhibit, though the Foundation has long refuted his claims: “Numerous reports about the troubles former Nixon Library director Dr. Timothy Naftali supposedly had to endure from the Nixon Foundation over his more than three-year effort to produce a new Watergate exhibit are entirely unfounded,” they wrote in a statement in 2012.
While Naftali sought to open the exhibit, Nixon loyalists filed a 132-page letter of objection to the National Archives and Records Administration. This held up the opening of the exhibit for months. During one private tour of the facility, Naftali says he was berated by a group of these loyalists—including Nixon’s brother, Edward Nixon. According to Naftali, the group told him to “get the hell out.” The ordeal ultimately took its toll: He resigned as museum director just eight months after the new exhibit finally opened.
Naftali says that young people—especially young, white men—-might relate to Nixon because they, too, see themselves as victims. (“Every disgruntled yet ambitious neurodivergent American man has a bit of Nixon in him,” reads one comment.) The Foundation, he says, is simply tapping into that insecurity.
“It’s zeitgeisty at a moment where we have a president who is the most powerful person in the world, and yet he wants us to believe he’s a victim,” he adds.
One can overstate some things from reading this. First, something being shared on social media thousands of times doesn’t really mean that much today. That can easily happen through the slightest bit of coordination. Second, the number of people paying attention to this–or anything political–in any kind of media is really very small. Remember the poll from recently that showed that 9% of Democrats had even heard of Ezra Klein’s Prosperity Agenda and yet it has consumed so much bandwidth in Democratic online spaces. Third, it’s entirely possible that some young men are seeing this stuff about Nixon and feeling like he’s them, but the chances are very high that if they are getting this far, they are already all the way there anyway.
So, aging, we can overstate it all. But it does tell us one thing very important–today’s right wingers see Richard Nixon as a hero, they want everyone to see Richard Nixon as a hero, and they intend to act like Richard Nixon in the future and they will do whatever they have to do to make this all possible. Bug the Democratic Party HQ? Commit massive crimes? Oh hell yes, that’s the best. Especially when you have the Roberts Court to back you up. That alone should be alarming for their plans in 2028 and beyond. 2026 too, maybe, they are far too disorganized.
Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively “we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer” I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.
You can read the interview here, you can buy my graphic novel featuring a gay vampire here, and you can call your congressmen about rejecting HR 2616, HR 8705, HR 7661 using 5calls.org (they don’t have these specific bills listed as things to call about, but luckily you can talk about whatever you want on the phone)
In his 1987 book The Game of Words, Willard R. Espy offered a poem of “forgotten positives”:
I dreamt of a corrigible, nocuous youth,
Gainly, gruntled, and kempt;
A mayed and a sidious fellow, forsooth —
Ordinate, effable, shevelled, ept, couth;
A delible fellow I dreamt.
Correspondingly, he pointed out, many common words ending in -less seem to have no opposites ending in -ful:
A tailful dog, one leaf-ful spring
Set out for toothful foraging,
And as he dug in rootful sod,
Paid voiceful tribute to his God.
At which, a feckful, loveful lass,
Whose strapful bodice charmed each pass-
Erby, cried out, “O timeful sound!
O ageful, lifeful, peerful hound!”
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