You're working. Maybe two jobs. Maybe your spouse works too. You budget. You plan. You cut back. And still, by the end of the month, the numbers don't add up. Rent takes half your income. Groceries cost twenty percent more than last year. Your kid needs braces. The car needs fixing. Health insurance went up again. You're doing everything right, and you're still falling behind. 

En este articulo

• Why feeling unable to afford life despite employment isn't personal failure
• How inflation statistics hide the real affordability crisis in housing, healthcare, education
• What happened when corporations shifted from value creation to value extraction
• How housing transformed from shelter to extraction mechanism
• Why civil engineers earning $100K can't afford homes in their own cities
• How healthcare, education, and insurance follow identical extraction patterns
• What shrinkflation and junkification reveal about quality erosion
• Why the middle class experiences financial stress as shame instead of solidarity

One-third of middle-class American families cannot afford basic necessities. Not luxuries. Necessities. Food, housing, and childcare. These are people with jobs. Often good jobs. Civil engineers in Asheville, making nearly $100,000 a year, who can't afford to buy a home. Librarians in Boise who lost the ability to rent a two-bedroom apartment and never got it back. Paralegals in Tampa who could afford a two-bedroom in 2023 lost it in 2024 and now can't even rent a one-bedroom.

This is widespread. This is documented. This is not anecdotal.

Seventy percent of Americans surveyed say the cost of living in their area is not affordable for the average family. Nearly half say their financial situation is worse than it was a year ago. People are skipping medical care, skipping medication, buying less food, switching to cheaper groceries, and taking on payday loans to survive. You are not alone in this struggle.

And they feel like it's their fault. Like they're doing something wrong. Like if they just budgeted better, worked harder, hustled more, they'd be fine. That's the cruelest part of the con. Making people believe their poverty is personal failure when it's actually systematic extraction.

This is Part 3 of a 4-part series. Parte 1 showed how platform monopolies and AI are destroying independent publishers. Parte 2 explained how Reagan-era policy changes rewired capitalism toward extraction. This part reveals how that same system impacts our daily lives, affecting all of us, regardless of who we are.

Why Blaming Inflation Misses the Point

The standard explanation is inflation. Prices went up. That's why you're struggling. Once inflation comes down, everything will be okay again. Just hang on. Just wait.

Except inflation already came down. And nothing's fine.

Inflation peaked at 9% and dropped to 3%, yet many still struggle. This disconnect should prompt us to question whether official numbers truly reflect our realities and to look deeper.

The Consumer Price Index averages unevenly. It doesn't accurately reflect housing costs. It underweights healthcare. It doesn't capture education expenses, childcare, or insurance premiums. The things that actually consume middle-class income barely show up in CPI calculations.

More importantly, prices rose fastest where competition disappeared. When four companies control an industry, they no longer compete on price. They don't have to. Consolidation creates pricing power. Pricing power creates permanent upward pressure. When inflation "cools," those prices don't come back down. They just stop rising as fast.

Housing prices soared because Wall Street bought up single-family homes, turning shelter into an asset class, directly raising costs for families. Similarly, healthcare costs increased due to hospital consolidations and pharmaceutical monopolies, making essential services less affordable for ordinary people. Connecting these mechanisms highlights how monopoly power shapes daily expenses.

None of that is inflation in the traditional sense. That's extraction enabled by monopoly power. Different mechanism. Different solution. And blaming inflation lets the actual culprits off the hook.

When Corporations Stopped Building and Started Extracting

This connects directly to what we covered in Parte 2. Corporations used to grow by producing better goods, expanding markets, and raising wages alongside productivity. That was the model. You built things people wanted. You paid workers enough to buy what you built. Everyone benefited unevenly but tangibly.

Then the incentive structure changed. After Reagan gutted antitrust enforcement, and as executive pay shifted to stock options, growth came from consolidation rather than innovation. Profits came from pricing power rather than from better products. Efficiency meant suppressing labor costs, not improving operations.

Stock price became the primary—often the only—measure of success. Everything else became secondary. Workers became a cost center to minimize. Customers became a revenue stream to maximize. Quality became optional as long as the stock price went up.

This shift explains outcomes that otherwise seem irrational. Why would a company destroy product quality while raising prices? Because stock prices reward short-term profit extraction, and executives are paid in stock. Why would a corporation suppress worker wages even when productivity soars? Because cutting payroll boosts quarterly earnings, which in turn increases the stock price.

The economy didn't evolve this way naturally. It was deliberately rebuilt this way. And the affordability crisis is what you get when you design an economy to extract value for shareholders rather than distribute gains through wages, competition, and investment.

The Productivity-Pay Divorce

Here's the number that explains everything. Productivity increased 80.9% from 1979 to 2024. Real wages for typical workers have been essentially flat, rising only 6-16% depending on the measure. That's a 65+ point gap between what workers produced and what they were paid.

Before 1979, those lines tracked together. Productivity went up, pay went up. Not perfectly, not equally, but together. Workers shared in the gains they created. That wasn't charity. That was policy. An intentional policy designed to distribute economic growth broadly.

Then the policy changed. The lines diverged. Productivity kept climbing. Pay stagnated. The gap between what workers create and what they earn became a chasm.

Where did the money go? Stock buybacks. Dividends. Executive compensation. In 2022, corporate stock buybacks exceeded $ 1.25 trillion. That's money that used to go into wages, research, and capital investment. Now it goes into artificially inflating stock prices so executives can meet their compensation targets.

Labor became something to suppress rather than invest in. Bargaining power collapsed. Union membership fell. Wage theft became routine. The minimum wage stopped tracking inflation. Overtime protections eroded. The entire structure that once channeled productivity gains into worker pay got dismantled piece by piece.

And here's the mechanism that connects to affordability. When workers don't get paid enough to afford what they produce, they go into debt. Credit cards. Payday loans. Buy-now-pay-later schemes. Household debt in the United States hit $ 18.6 trillion. Revolving credit alone exceeds 1.2 trillion. Serious delinquencies—people more than ninety days late—passed three percent for the first time since the financial crisis.

This isn't mysterious. When payroll stops being an investment, affordability collapses. Can't budget your way out of that.

Monopoly Pricing Isn't a Market Force

Parte 2 explained how the Reagan-era antitrust collapse allowed consolidation across every industry. Airlines went from dozens of carriers to four. Media ownership has gone from fifty companies to six. Banking from dozens of institutions to four controlling half the assets. Food processing, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications—pick a sector, find the same pattern.

What does that have to do with affordability? Everything.

When four companies control an industry, they don't compete on price. They compete on branding, on marketing, on creating the illusion of choice while maintaining pricing discipline. Fewer competitors mean higher prices. Mergers eliminate price pressure. Fees replace transparent pricing. And every "efficiency gain" from consolidation flows upward to shareholders, not outward to consumers.

You see this everywhere. Four airlines control eighty percent of domestic flights. Ticket prices don't reflect competition. They reflect coordinated pricing power. Four beef processors control eighty-five percent of the market. Farmers get squeezed. Consumers pay more. The processors capture the spread.

Grocery prices rose faster than inflation even after supply chains recovered. Why? Because grocery retail has consolidated. When a handful of chains dominate, they don't have to compete aggressively on price. They optimize for profit margins instead.

This is pricing power, not market forces. And it creates permanent upward pressure on costs that personal budgeting cannot overcome. You can't coupon your way out of monopoly extraction.

Housing Became an Extraction Machine

Housing is where the affordability crisis becomes impossible to ignore. The numbers are brutal and getting worse.

To afford a typical home in America today, you need to earn $121,400 per year. The median household income is about $84,000. That's a $37,000 gap between what people earn and what they pay in housing costs. And it's getting wider.

This didn't happen because of supply and demand in any normal sense. It happened because housing shifted from a shelter to an asset class. Wall Street firms, REITs, and private equity bought up single-family homes. Not to live in. To extract rent from. Institutional investors now own significant chunks of the housing stock in major metros. They don't compete by lowering rents. They coordinate to maximize returns.

Meanwhile, homebuilding collapsed after 2008 and never fully recovered. Meeting current demand would require building four million additional homes beyond current construction levels. But construction workers can't afford to live where they're building. Electricians in Asheville can't afford one-bedroom apartments. Civil engineers making $100,000 can't buy homes in the markets they serve.

Rent rises faster than wages year after year. In Miami, the median home price is seven times the median household income. That's higher than the bubble that preceded the financial crisis. Homeownership becomes a fading dream. Entire generations get locked into permanent rent extraction with no path to ownership.

And the policy response? Proposals for fifty-year mortgages. Extending debt servitude across half a century instead of addressing why housing costs so much in the first place. That's not a solution. That's surrender dressed up as innovation.

Housing costs are not market forces. They're pricing power is enabled by consolidation, financialization, and regulatory failure. When shelter becomes a profit center for Wall Street, affordability becomes structurally impossible.

Healthcare, Education, Insurance: Same Playbook

The pattern repeats across every essential service.

Healthcare has been consolidated into massive hospital systems. Independent practices got swallowed. Competition disappeared. Costs exploded. Pharmaceutical companies face no meaningful price discipline. A drug that costs pennies to manufacture sells for hundreds of dollars because the company holds a monopoly on production and the government doesn't negotiate prices.

Health insurance premiums for people buying through the Affordable Care Act are jumping from an average of $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026 for those who lost subsidies. That's not inflation. That's extraction. People who get insurance through employers are seeing seven percent increases. Every year. Compounding.

Education followed the same trajectory. Universities financialized. Tuition exploded. Student debt became a profit center for lenders. The cost has nothing to do with instruction quality. It tracks the availability of federal loans. Schools raised prices because they could, and students borrowed because they had to. Now, student loan delinquencies exceed fourteen percent. Worst level in years.

Insurance across the board—health, auto, home—turned into oligopolies that extract through complexity and denial. Premiums go up. Coverage goes down. Claims get rejected. The system optimizes for profit, not service. And consumers have no meaningful alternative because competition has been consolidated.

Each sector shows identical incentive logic. Consolidate. Eliminate competition. Maximize pricing power. Extract maximum value. Different industries, same system, same outcomes. And middle-class families caught in the middle are watching every essential service become unaffordable simultaneously.

When Products Cost More and Deliver Less

It's not just that prices rise. Quality falls at the same time. This is shrinkflation and junkification—the twin strategies of extraction economics.

Products cost more and contain less. The package gets smaller. The portions shrink. The materials get cheaper. Consumers pay the same or more for objectively less value. Companies blame "inflation" while their profit margins expand.

Services degrade while prices climb. Customer service becomes automated phone trees. Wait times explode. Actual humans become impossible to reach. Airlines charge for seats, bags, legroom, and everything that used to be included. Fees replace service. Nickel-and-diming becomes the business model.

Complexity hides extraction. Bills become incomprehensible. Pricing structures obscure actual costs. Subscriptions auto-renew. Cancellations require navigating deliberate obstacles. The friction is intentional. It's designed to make you give up and keep paying.

And when you complain, you get blamed. You're too demanding. You're nostalgic for a past that didn't exist. You don't understand modern business realities. The narrative shifts from corporate extraction to consumer entitlement.

This mirrors exactly what happened to internet content. Publishers created value. Platforms extracted it. Quality degraded. Creators got blamed for not "adapting." Same playbook. Same contempt for the people generating value. Same insistence that deterioration is progress.

Why the Middle Class Feels Trapped

The psychological toll of the affordability crisis goes beyond money. It's stress, shame, isolation, and the constant grinding knowledge that you're one emergency away from catastrophe.

Fixed costs consume income. Rent, insurance, healthcare, childcare, student loans, and car payments. Before you buy a single grocery, half your paycheck is gone. What's left has to cover everything else. There's no margin for error. No room for saving. No buffer for the unexpected.

Debt replaces security. Credit cards become emergency funds. Payday loans bridge the gap. Buy now, pay later turns every purchase into a payment plan. You're not building wealth. You're managing cascading obligations with money you don't have yet.

Stress replaces planning. You can't think five years ahead when you're worried about making rent next month. Long-term goals become fantasies. Retirement savings get raided for current expenses. The future becomes something happening to you, not something you're building toward.

Shame replaces solidarity. You're embarrassed you can't afford life. You hide your struggles. You don't talk about it because admitting financial stress feels like confessing personal failure. Meanwhile, everyone around you is hiding the same battle, feeling the same shame, convinced they're alone.

This isolation is part of the extraction mechanism. When people feel individually responsible for systemic problems, they don't organize. They don't demand change. They just try harder to adapt. Like publishers were told to optimize for algorithms designed to replace them. Adapt harder. Budget better. Hustle more. And when it still doesn't work, blame yourself.

One System, Multiple Victims

The connection between Parts 1, 2, and 3 should be clear now. This is the same system manifesting in different contexts.

Platform monopolies extract value from creators. Publishers create content. Google trains AI on it, replaces their traffic, and keeps the revenue. Creators get citations they can't deposit.

Corporations extract value from consumers. Workers create productivity gains. Executives convert them to stock buybacks. Shareholders get richer. Workers experience wage stagnation.

The extractive class extracts value from everyone. Stock price becomes the only measure that matters. Quarterly earnings drive every decision. Long-term sustainability—of businesses, workers, communities, and the information ecosystem—becomes irrelevant.

AI accelerates all of it. Platforms use AI to replace human labor without compensation. Corporations use AI to optimize pricing and suppress wages. The technology isn't neutral. It's deployed within an incentive structure designed for extraction.

Sustainability gets sacrificed for quarterly performance. Every quarter. Forever. Until something breaks. And when it breaks, the people who built the system will have already cashed out and moved on. That's what stock-based executive compensation incentivizes. Pump the price. Hit your targets. Get out before the consequences land.

One system. Publishers lose traffic. Workers lose wages. Consumers lose affordability. The mechanism is identical. The victims just have different names.

Why Personal Advice Is Structural Gaslighting

The standard response to the affordability crisis is personal advice. Budget better. Cut unnecessary expenses. Get a side hustle. Build an emergency fund. Invest in yourself. Take control of your finances.

All of it is useless against structural extraction.

Budgeting cannot overcome monopoly pricing power. When rent takes half your income because housing became an asset class for Wall Street, no amount of coupon-clipping fixes that. When healthcare premiums double because insurance is consolidated into oligopolies, skipping lattes doesn't close the gap.

Side hustles cannot replace wage stagnation. You're already working full-time. Adding gig work to supplement wages that stopped tracking productivity forty years ago isn't a solution. It's confirmation that the primary economy stopped functioning for workers.

Rate hikes punish workers, not extractors. When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to "fight inflation," it increases unemployment and suppresses wage growth. Corporations with pricing power pass costs to consumers. Workers lose jobs and bargaining power. The cure is worse than the disease for everyone except capital.

Tax credits don't restore competition. Subsidizing costs in monopolized markets just lets corporations capture the subsidy. Rent assistance becomes landlord assistance. Healthcare subsidies become insurance company assistance. Without price competition, aid flows upward.

The advice industry's approach to affordability is gaslighting dressed up as empowerment. It tells people they can individually overcome systemic problems designed to extract from them. And when the advice doesn't work—because it can't—the failure gets personalized. You didn't budget hard enough. You weren't disciplined enough. You made bad choices.

No. The system extracted from you. Personal effort cannot overcome structural incentives to extract. Without reforming those incentives, the pressure remains permanent.

When Survival Becomes the Product

The affordability crisis is not accidental. It's not temporary. It's not caused by individual failure, bad luck, or inflation alone. It's the inevitable outcome of an economy redesigned to extract value for shareholders rather than distribute gains through wages, competition, and investment.

The system is functioning as designed. The design just produces outcomes most people wouldn't choose if they understood the mechanism. Productivity rises. Pay stagnates. Prices climb. Quality falls. Debt replaces security. And people blame themselves for drowning in water that's rising by policy.

Affordability will not return without structural change. Individual effort cannot overcome systemic extraction. Budgeting cannot defeat monopoly pricing. Side hustles cannot replace wages that stopped tracking productivity in 1979.

The real question facing the middle class isn't how to survive the affordability crisis. It's whether to accept an economic system where survival itself became the product everyone is forced to buy, at prices set by people who already own everything, paid for with money you'll never earn because the people setting the prices also decided what you're worth.

When an economy is designed to extract value, survival becomes expensive. That's not a bug. That's the product working as intended.

Sobre el autor

Robert Jennings es coeditor de InnerSelf.com, una plataforma dedicada a empoderar a las personas y promover un mundo más conectado y equitativo. Robert, veterano del Cuerpo de Marines y del Ejército de los EE. UU., aprovecha sus diversas experiencias de vida, desde trabajar en el sector inmobiliario y la construcción hasta crear InnerSelf.com con su esposa, Marie T. Russell, para aportar una perspectiva práctica y fundamentada a los desafíos de la vida. InnerSelf.com, fundada en 1996, comparte conocimientos para ayudar a las personas a tomar decisiones informadas y significativas para sí mismas y para el planeta. Más de 30 años después, InnerSelf continúa inspirando claridad y empoderamiento.

 Creative Commons 4.0

Este artículo está licenciado bajo una licencia Creative Commons Reconocimiento-Compartir Igual 4.0. Atribuir al autor Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com. Enlace de regreso al artículo Este artículo apareció originalmente en InnerSelf.com

Resumen del artículo

The affordability crisis crushing middle-class families isn't caused by inflation alone or personal failure. It's the inevitable consequence of wage stagnation meeting monopoly pricing power. Productivity rose 80.9% from 1979-2024 while pay rose only 29.4%—a deliberate policy outcome from Reagan-era changes. Stock buybacks replaced wage growth. Executive compensation tied to stock price incentivized labor suppression. Corporate consolidation eliminated price competition in housing, healthcare, education, and essential services. One-third of middle-class families cannot afford basic necessities despite employment. Civil engineers earning $100K can't buy homes. Librarians can't rent two-bedrooms. Housing transformed from shelter to Wall Street asset class. Healthcare, education, and insurance consolidated into extraction mechanisms. Shrinkflation and junkification show quality erosion alongside price increases. The same extractive system destroying independent publishers crushes middle-class survival. Budgeting cannot overcome monopoly pricing power. Side hustles cannot replace structural wage stagnation. Without reversing Reagan-era incentive structures, affordability pressure remains permanent. When an economy is designed to extract value for shareholders rather than distribute gains, survival becomes the product everyone is forced to buy.

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