“Minimum wage, in real terms, is more than thirty per cent lower than it was fifty years ago. (Since the nineteen-eighties, most of the benefits of America’s growing economy have gone to the wealthy.) Meanwhile, housing costs have more than doubled since 2000. ‘When people say they live paycheck to paycheck, it’s not that they’re managing their money poorly,’ Sharon Parrott, a senior vice-president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me. ‘Instead, their housing costs are taking up a disproportionate share of their incomes.’ The result is a slim margin of error: forty per cent of Americans don’t have four hundred dollars cash to spare in an emergency.” Eliza Griswold in The New Yorker: How the Coronavirus is Killing the Middle Class. (Hint: It’s wasn’t really the middle class before the pandemic hit.)

+ Related from The New Yorker: Have the Record Number of Investors in the Stock Market Lost Their Minds?