However, Murray Rothbard used to tell us in class that GDP was a ridiculous way to gauge the strength of the economy. He said if the U.S. government destroyed everything west of the Mississippi and then rebuilt it, the nation’s GDP would explode but no one west of the Mississippi would be better off.

In fact, the growth in prices has left lower income Americans broke. According to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, “High-income households are fine, but the bottom third of U.S. consumers are tapped out. Their savings rate right now is zero.”

Almost Daily Grant’s reports that overall credit card balances reached $1.17 trillion in the third quarter, up 26 percent over the prior two years. Many borrowers can’t make the payments leading to “U.S. credit card firms [writing] off $46 billion of bad debt over the first three quarters of 2024, reports the Financial Times, citing research from BankRegData. That represents a 50 percent uptick from the same period last year and marks the highest comparable nine-month figure since the Great Recession’s aftermath in 2010.”