A Paycheck That Never Showed Up
You’re watching a warehouse supervisor in Dayton, Ohio. She clocks in at 6 a.m. and runs a crew of twelve for about $58,000 a year. Now drop her into an America that kept sharing its growth with working people the way it did in 1975, back when the bottom 90 percent of earners took home about two thirds of all the taxable income in this country, and think hard about what her pay stub would say. Same job. Same hours. Her paycheck would look nothing like the one she gets today.
That missing money has a name and a number, and as a trial lawyer who has spent decades following the money in courtrooms, I want you to know both before you fill out your ballot this fall.
RAND Ran the Numbers
On February 17, 2025, RAND Corporation mathematician Carter Price published an update to a 2020 study he wrote with economist Kathryn Edwards. The working paper was sponsored by a policy group called Civic Ventures.
Price measured one thing. He calculated what the bottom 90 percent of American workers would have earned if they had held on to the 66.57 percent share of taxable income they had in 1975. That share kept sliding. It fell to 49.53 percent by 2015 and to 46.8 percent in 2019, the latest year in the data. He knew money that big goes somewhere, and he wanted to find out where. What he discovered is that this money went up the ladder.
Price found the bottom 90 percent would have earned $3.9 trillion more in 2023 alone. Add up every year from 1975 through 2023 and the gap reaches $79 trillion, measured in 2023 dollars, a number so large it sounds made up until you remember it stands for raises that never came and savings accounts that never grew in millions of American homes.
Senator Bernie Sanders’ office took the 2023 figure and split it among full time workers in the bottom 90 percent, and the answer came to about $32,000 per worker. Spread the same money across every earner in that group, roughly 140 million people, and it lands at about $28,000 each.
RAND measures money that shifted from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent. Price has said the biggest gains landed on the highest rung of all, with the richest tenth of the top 1 percent.
RAND’s paper blames no president by name. It ties the growing gap to a shrinking share for working people, plus a bigger economy and higher prices that made each lost percentage point worth more dollars. This gap grew quietly, one flat paycheck at a time.
Inequality never mails you a bill; it quietly skips your raise and calls the missing money the economy.
Where We Stand Today
RAND’s math stops at 2023. Every newer number points the same way, and it points up for the people at the top.
The Federal Reserve tracks household wealth every three months, and on September 18 it released figures running through June 2026 that should stop you cold, because they show the top 1 percent now holding 32.5 percent of all American household wealth, the highest share since the Fed started this count in 1989. The old record, 31.8 percent, was set at the end of 2025.
Now look at everyone else. The bottom 90 percent holds 31.1 percent combined, with 28.8 percent held by households between the 50th and 90th percentiles and 2.3 percent spread across the entire bottom half of the country. Three months earlier, the bottom 90 percent still held a little more, 31.9 percent to 31.7 percent for the top group.
As of June, the top 1 percent owns more than the bottom 90 percent put together.
What that means house by house, you should hear from me plainly. The average household in the top 1 percent holds about 94 times the wealth of the average household in the bottom 90 percent. Line up 94 ordinary families on your street, and one average family from the top 1 percent owns as much as all of them combined.
Much of that climb rides on the stock market. The top 1 percent owns 50.9 percent of all the corporate stock and mutual fund shares American households hold, so every Wall Street rally pours the biggest share of the winnings into the richest homes.
Forbes counted 989 American billionaires on its March 2026 list, a record, holding about $8.4 trillion between them. Forbes counted them by citizenship and set their values as of March 1.
Washington’s Fingerprints on Your Wallet
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, President Trump signed it into law on July 4, 2025. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office studied who wins and who loses under that law, averaged over 2026 through 2034 and measured in 2025 dollars. The poorest tenth of households loses about $1,200 a year, or 3.1 percent of income, mainly from cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, the food assistance program. Households in the middle, the fifth and sixth tenths, gain roughly $800 to $1,200 a year. The richest tenth gains about $13,600 a year, or 2.7 percent of income, mainly from tax cuts. CBO’s figures leave out the cost of the extra federal borrowing. They also leave out the permanent extension of larger estate and gift tax exemptions, worth about $210 billion. That break goes to families rich enough to owe estate tax in the first place.
Tariffs pile more weight onto the same side of the scale. Think of a tariff as a sales tax nobody put on your ballot, collected at the border and passed along to you at the register. Working families spend more of every dollar on the goods tariffs hit, so they feel the sting first. Yale’s Budget Lab estimated this spring that the tariff burden on the lowest income households runs about three times heavier, as a share of income, than the burden on the top 10 percent.
The rules keep shifting. In February, the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs the administration had imposed under an emergency powers law. A replacement round under Section 122 ran out on July 24, and new tariffs under Section 301 took over. Yale’s August update puts the average cost of today’s tariffs at about $1,100 a year per household, money that comes straight out of grocery budgets families have already stretched thin after years of higher prices at every store in town.
The federal minimum wage still sits at $7.25 an hour, right where Congress left it on July 24, 2009. That is the longest freeze since the federal minimum wage began in 1938. Work full time at that rate for a whole year and you gross $15,080.
When Congress freezes the minimum wage for seventeen years, working families take a pay cut nobody ever had to vote for.
Unions once gave workers real muscle at the bargaining table. In 1983, 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers carried a union card. By 2025, 10 percent did, and in the private sector the figure sits at 5.9 percent. The government shutdown last fall wiped out a month of survey data, so the Labor Department flags its 2025 union numbers as not strictly comparable to other years.
Before You Vote
The direction is clear. Wealth at the top set a new record in the Fed’s newest count, and according to Congress’s own scorekeeper the biggest economic law of this administration tilts its gains toward the top and cuts resources at the bottom, so you feel it at the checkout line and in your monthly bills.
Every paycheck in America carries fine print, and the people you elect write every word of it.
The midterm elections land on November 3. Before you vote, look up how your House member and your senators voted on the 2025 reconciliation law, and then press every candidate on your ballot to state, on the record, where they stand on raising the federal minimum wage. Frankly, if they’re a Republican who voted for Trump’s bills and agenda, I wouldn’t believe anything they say, but that’s another post for another time. Right now, the facts speak for themselves.
Share this with one person who works hard and still feels like they keep falling behind, because they deserve to know the number, and the number is $79 trillion.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
If this post opened your eyes to the $79 trillion gap between what working Americans earned and what they should have earned, subscribe now so you get the facts behind every paycheck, tax bill and ballot decision that shapes your family’s future. Then share this with your family and friends before November 3, because every voter who knows the number makes it harder for Washington to keep writing the fine print against you.
Trickle down economics is working exactly as it was designed to.
Which is to say, not at all.
Great explanation of the massive movement of our money to the massively rich by Trump and the GOP. It's highway robbery. Thank you.