by Michael Snyder
If you go to bed at night worried about money and you get up in the morning still worried about money, you are far from alone. In 2026, financial stress is an inescapable reality for most Americans. There is still a very small segment of the population that is doing really well, but the vast majority of us are just trying to find a way to scrape by from month to month. When you work as hard as you can and it just isn’t enough, it can be absolutely soul crushing. As I discussed last week, 44 percent of Americans struggle to even afford the most basic necessities. We can all feel that the middle class is steadily eroding, and in this article I am going to share some shocking new numbers that absolutely prove that this is happening.
When I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was living a middle class lifestyle. Homes were very affordable, nobody had anxiety about paying for healthcare, gasoline was extremely cheap, and grocery prices were not a concern at all. Beef was so cheap in those days, and we ate like kings. But now who can afford to eat beef on a regular basis? Perhaps the wealthy can, but for most of us a simple visit to the grocery store is very painful. In fact, many Americans now skip meals on a regular basis just to save money. And a single trip to the hospital can mean financial ruin. This is what life is like in America today.
Yes, we are making far more money than we once did.But the purchasing power of our money has declined much faster than our paychecks have risen. Adam Livingston has shared some numbers that show just how dramatically our standard of living has gone down since the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971…
The fact that median household income is 9.7 times higher than it was in 1971 sounds like great news. But the bad news is that the amount of gold that the median household income can buy has dropped by 88 percent since 1971.If you look at the chart above, you will see that our standard of living has really been going downhill since the year 2000.
Needless to say, those at the bottom of the economic pyramid have been hit the hardest. In a different post, Adam Livingston also pointed out that the federal minimum wage has lost about 95 percent of its value since 1971 when measured in gold…
Nobody can survive on the federal minimum wage today. $7.25 times 40 hours a week is just $290. And that is before taxes. Nobody can afford rent, utilities, food and healthcare on such an income. In fact, much of the country cannot afford rent, utilities, food and healthcare at this stage.
For 46-year-old Cindy Banda, just keeping the house, providing the basics for her kids and paying for her cancer treatment has become a seemingly impossible task…"The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda’s bedazzled flip-flops landed on the asphalt of the Houston cancer center’s vast parking lot. She threaded through the rows of cars, a tally of patients who gather here to sit with chemotherapy needles or lie on radiation machines.
The elevator dinged open. A year ago in this building, surgeons removed Banda’s right breast, and she still didn’t know whether treatment had expunged the cancer from her body. Doctors had told her it would be tough to beat. “I’m more of a positive person myself,” Banda said, now sitting with a white wristband in a dim waiting room. But the bills are harder to dismiss, and the single mother with six children in her care repeated something like a mantra. “Keep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable.”
Can you identify with her? I know that a lot of you can. Even if you have a decent job, trying to survive in this harsh economic environment is exceedingly difficult. And now decent jobs are disappearing all around us.
31-year-old Lissette Ramos has submitted hundreds of job applications over the past year, and she still can’t find anything…"Gone is the daily office commute. Now, after tending to her cats in the morning, Ramos heads straight to her desk to check the daily job alerts. She spends four to eight hours scouring sites like LinkedIn, Indeed and HiringCafe, customizing her resume for positions that fit her qualifications. At 5 p.m., she feeds her cats, goes for a walk to get in her 10,000 steps and returns home to lift weights before settling in for the evening. Yet one year and hundreds of applications later, she is still stuck in a job search catch-22 – overqualified for entry-level work yet sidelined for junior and mid-level roles."
I feel so bad for those that are out of work right now. Most resumes get discarded by AI hiring screeners before they are ever seen by a human…New technology has made applying for a job easier than ever, flooding recruiters with resumes and creating massive bottlenecks. What’s more, these AI hiring screeners can filter out and reject candidates so employers often don’t see their application. Rutgers public policy professor Carl Van Horn, who has studied unemployment trends for 40 years, frequently hears from applicants who submit hundreds of resumes without a single human reply. Omit the right keywords and “they’ve put their resume into the abyss,” he said.
If you don’t have personal connections, searching for a job can be so daunting. Unfortunately, more good jobs are being eliminated with each passing day. For example, American Express just announced that they will be cutting thousands of jobs… American Express is cutting thousands of employees as the leading credit card company prepares for artificial intelligence to take over more of its internal processes.
Amex is eliminating 5% of its global workforce and taking a $336 million restructuring charge, CEO Stephen Squeri told analysts Friday on the company’s third-quarter earnings call. The firm had almost 77,000 employees at the end of 2025.Chief Financial Officer Christophe Le Caillec told CNBC in an interview that the restructuring was to make American Express “leaner, more agile, and also to prepare for AI.” AI has become the number one reason why companies are laying people off. As AI models become even more sophisticated and even more efficient, the number of jobs lost to AI will only go up.
We have also just learned that Comcast is “gearing up for significant job cuts”…Comcast is gearing up for significant job cuts in its cable and telecom business in the coming weeks, as the media conglomerate restructures ahead the expected spin-off of NBCUniversal in 2027. On the company’s third-quarter 2026 earning call, CFO Jason Armstrong said Comcast expects to take a restructuring charge of more than $1 billion in Q4. “We expect to have a significant charge in the fourth quarter related mostly to our transformation efforts, and I would quantify that at over $1 billion,” he told analysts.
This is just the beginning. A lot more layoffs are on the way. If you currently have a good job, my advice would be to hold on to it as tightly as you can, because competition among those that are looking for good jobs has become extremely fierce. Ultimately, most of us just want to live a middle class lifestyle just like our parents did. But more seats are being pulled out of the middle class every single day, and economic stress is on the rise all over the nation."
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