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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the squeezed-bottom frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Concentration-risk frame
The economy is now dangerously dependent on the spending of high earners whose confidence rides on inflated asset prices, meaning a market correction could yank out the single pillar holding consumption up.
Squeezed-bottom frame
Persistent above-average inflation and the expiration of pandemic-era relief have hollowed out low- and middle-income households, leaving them with no buffer while the wealthy pull further ahead on financial-asset gains.
Nothing-new frame
The K-shape is being oversold: wealthy households have anchored roughly the same share of consumption for a quarter century, so what looks like a fragile new divide is closer to a long-standing feature of American spending.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot B
The hollowed-out-base case
A labor-aligned economist would argue —
Before the pandemic, lower-income households were actually outpacing the wealthy in spending growth. That flipped in 2023, exactly when relief programs ran out and inflation kept running hotter for the goods and services these families can't substitute away from. The result is visible in the data: cumulative real spending growth of barely 1% for households under $40,000, versus 7.6% at the top. This isn't a story about the rich getting richer in the abstract — it's a story about working families burning through their buffer and then standing still, while asset-holders compound double-digit wealth gains. Any honest read of these numbers says the bottom of the K isn't lagging by choice; it's been squeezed flat.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.