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DECEMBER 1, 2025

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In this article, I write about the often vague idea of cultural affordability—how we pay for the social non-necessities in our lives, like weddings, sporting events, and going out to eat. I argue that these kinds of purchases have become inaccessible to many middle class consumers as the rich continue to get richer and dominate our economy. The availability of credit, especially through “buy now, pay later” platforms, makes it easier than ever for consumers to go into debt to keep up with the lives we are sold through our screens. I don’t think this is a problem of personal spending responsibility. I doubt we could budget our way out of this. Like so many affordability issues, the problem lies with our deeply unequal economy and the corporations that help make it so.

–Emma Janssen, writing fellow

Selling the Poor on Spending Like They’re Rich

We are living in a new Gilded Age. The first, from roughly 1870 to 1890, was marked by dramatic inequality: Wealthy monopolists like bank tycoons and railroad barons saw their fortunes boom as the country industrialized, while the poor, particularly in the post-Reconstruction South, continued to suffer. A cast of corrupt men controlled the flow of capital and political power, shaping the country around their will. Thus it was not a golden age, but a gilded one—a veneer of prosperity hiding the real economic and social rot below.

Today, with a president obsessed with gold and material wealth, the Second Gilded Age metaphors write themselves; just look at the literally gilded add-ons to the Oval Office. Tens of millions of Americans rely on government food and medical assistance that Republicans have voted to cut; some Americans use “buy now, pay later” apps to pay for their rent and groceries; and wages can’t keep up with inflation. But the wealthy are doing just fine. The stock market is up 48 percent since 2022; luxury-brand purchases are holding strong; and Elon Musk is about to get a $1 trillion pay package. Our country is dramatically unequal, and it’s only getting worse.

The rich have a gravitational pull on the economy, dragging it in their direction. According to economic researchers at Moody’s Analytics, the top 10 percent of Americans earners are now doing almost half of the spending. Even those economists who dispute this specific number concede that the wealthiest Americans are doing an outsized amount of consumer spending. The wealth of the top 10 percent is up to $113 trillion. The top 1 percent holds $52 trillion in wealth, a new record.

This produces an unclear picture of the economy. Even though the majority of Americans are feeling the squeeze of inflation and rising unemployment, the ultra-wealthy are doing well enough to keep spending, which makes it look like everyone has kept spending. If you stop looking at averages and check the wealth of who’s actually spending, you can better understand the economic realities for the majority of Americans: There’s one line steadily going up, and another going down. There’s another reason that this wealth and spending inequality matters: It makes things more expensive for everyone.

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This story originally appeared in The American Prospect’s December magazine issue. You can subscribe here and support our work.

In this issue, we wanted to pull out the more endemic drivers behind why everything is so unaffordable, to look beyond Donald Trump’s contribution or other short-term factors. We started from the premise that if you don’t understand why things are getting unaffordable, you won’t be able to fix it.