Can I actually make it?

We've been here before. The Industrial Revolution let us make more than ever, and it took unions and decades of fighting to win our share: the weekend, the eight-hour day, a paycheck that grew with what we made. Because the economy runs on the people who make things, not CEOs.

And it worked, until about 1980. Since then we produce about 80% more per hour, but a typical paycheck only crept from ~$42k to ~$50k. It barely moved.

Had pay kept pace, it'd be ~$82–92k. That missing ~$32,000 a year didn't vanish. It moved up. A typical CEO now earns 290× a worker.

How did the deal break? Unions shrank from 1 in 5 workers to 1 in 10 (BLS), and “trickle-down” tax cuts never trickled: tested 50 years across 18 countries, they only grew the gap. (LSE)

The squeeze doesn't stay in your paycheck. It shows up at your front door.

A typical home now costs 5.5 years of a family's income, up from 3 in 1990. And the typical first-time buyer is 40, the oldest ever recorded.

Priced out of buying? Rent eats a third of your paycheck, if you can find it.

Then Wall Street moved in. Before 2011, no investor owned more than 1,000 homes; by 2022, 32 firms owned ~450,000. (GAO)

They buy 1 in 4 of the cheapest homes, often all-cash, above asking. Sellers accept. Of course they do.

Each sale resets the value of the homes nearby, so the whole neighborhood's property taxes rise, and the one thing that ever built working-class wealth slips further out of reach.

We live in the richest country in history, wealth our own work created. Our health should be worth as much as our labor.

Instead the burden falls on us, workers and small-business owners, who pay more for coverage than any country on Earth.

And it buys shorter lives than every peer nation: about 78 years, and stalled.

We've driven the uninsured rate to a record low, about 8%, a real win. But mental health is a crisis: half who need care don't get it.

And “deaths of despair” (overdose, suicide, alcohol) have doubled since 2008.

Here's where the hope lives: work hard, study hard, do better than your parents. That was the deal.

For kids born in 1940, 92% out-earned their parents.

For kids today, it's a coin flip, about 50%. The American Dream, cut in half.

And the bet costs more than ever. College is up 180% since 2000, and not because it's for-profit: the ranks of administrators roughly doubled while teaching stayed flat. (research)

Childcare now out-costs college in most states, before school even starts.

All of this, just as the ground shifts again. We opened with the Industrial Revolution. Here's the next one.

AI data centers are the fastest-growing draw on the power grid, already about half of all new U.S. electricity demand.

And the bill lands on us. In one 13-state region, about $9.3 billion in higher power costs got spread across 67 million people, roughly $21 more a month. (the breakdown)

The jobs are few: a giant data center runs on 15–100 permanent workers, while collecting hundreds of millions in tax breaks.

The costs aren't only on the bill. Diesel and gas generators push fine-particle pollution into the neighborhoods next door, and one peer-reviewed model projects about 1,300 extra deaths a year by 2030. (study)

And Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic (one of the companies building this AI), warns it could erase half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10–20%, even as GDP booms: “the economy grows at 10% a year… and 20% of people don't have jobs.” (Axios)

Same story, new machine: we make the wealth, and it flows to whoever owns the machines. Last time it took unions and decades to win our share. This time is being decided right now.