Americans Are Reaching a Financial Breaking Point

The majority of Americans are actively stressed about money. The rich have never been richer. No wonder we’re so mad.

(Screenshot via TikTok)

Buying a tomato today will cost you 40 percent more than it did one year ago. There are many markers of the current unaffordability of American life, with gas prices— now ​​at more than $4.50 a gallon thanks to Trump’s pointless war on Iran—cited most frequently. We are nickel and dimed by ever-increasing “ streamflation ,” so-called “convenience fees” and “ shrinkflation ,” whereby companies deceptively shrink product sizes while charging the same—or even more. Others examples are perhaps more consequential. Renting an apartment is 54 percent more expensive than it was in 2017, housing prices are up 60 percent since 2019 , families will spend $120 more on electricity this year than they did in 2025 , and credit card debt is up 63 percent since just 2021. But there’s something so startling and symbolic about a single red tomato costing 40 percent more than it did just 12 months ago. It’s as if even the simplest and most ordinary comforts of American life are quietly being put out of reach.

That bleakness is reflected in surveys about Americans’ personal finances, which reveal a creeping sense that everyday life is growing financially untenable. Sixty-seven percent of Americans say they’re actively stressed about money, according to a CBS News poll released this month. Most Americans, at 55 percent, say their finances are worsening—the highest percentage since Gallup started asking the question in 2001 , and meaning that more people feel financially pessimistic today than did during the pandemic or the Great Recession of 2008. Two thirds of Americans haven’t been able to attend social engagements—decidedly unluxurious events like birthday dinners, weddings, and holiday gatherings—because of financial limitations, and most of them, 55 percent, lied to friends and family about money being the reason. One third of Americans reported skipping meals or driving less to save gas money for health care costs in a survey conducted in mid-2025—even before Trump caused the cost of gas to skyrocket even higher—while one-quarter had delayed surgery and other treatments because of cost. What’s more, one-third of the country has no savings , leaving them unable to absorb even a $400 medical emergency. How grimly fitting, then, that nearly 7 out of 10 Americans are more worried about going broke than dying.

As much as every policy decision Trump makes seems crafted to hasten our collective financial suffocation, this country has been choked with extreme inequality for quite some time. After an extended period of economic growth following the New Deal era and World War II, America has seen increasing income inequality since the 1970s , and today has the highest wealth inequality among G7 nations , while having some of the worst economic mobility in the developed world . The top 10 percent of the country owns almost 95 percent of all stocks, nearly half of Americans have $0 in retirement savings , and the amount of wealth held by the top .1 percent of the country is roughly equivalent to that held by the bottom 90 percent . “U.S. inequality has returned to levels not seen since the early 1900s,” writes Capital and Main , which is a funny way of reminding us that we’ve kinda always been this way. The extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few can be traced to the founding of a country that once tied political power explicitly to white male landownership. Meanwhile, the exclusion of Black folks, women and other marginalized groups helped establish a national ethos in which austerity and disinvestment were normalized—first just for marginalized communities but eventually, for everyone else, too. Thanks to a public education system that propagated the notion of bootstrap individualism as a civic virtue, and a culture that elevated astonishingly rare rags-to-riches stories as the achievable norm, the myth of American mobility nevertheless flourished. But studies have long shown that Americans grossly overestimate the scalability of this country’s economic ladders . Those myths were always a way to make people treat the systemic failures of free-market capitalism as their own personal shortcomings. The national delusion that everyone is a millionaire in waiting is, in some ways, what allowed the development of the billionaire class we have today.

All the while, the particularly unchecked brand of capitalism we have here in the US has worked to extract the maximum from working people while returning the barest minimum, fueling the rise of inequality that now engulfs us all. The average CEO to worker compensation was 20-to-1 in 1965. In the early 1990s, it climbed to 58-to-1 . Want to know what it was in 2025? A staggering 285-to-1 . At the 20 companies that employ the greatest number of low wage workers—including Walmart, Home Depot, Best Buy, Starbucks and Amazon—it was just shy…