Name: Something’s Going Seriously Wrong in United States
Uploaded: 2025-09-25T18:29:49.000Z
Duration: 18 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

The zero and first conditional

If you would work hard, you can find a stable job that will allow you to buy a house, build a family, and have a decent, calm life.

Present continuous

But if you look around, life is getting harder and harder.

More and more people are living paycheck to paycheck and the idea of owning a house is becoming unrealistic for more and more people.

Credit card debts and student loans are skyrocketing and are hitting new records every single year.

On one side, the US economy is hitting a new record every single year.

On the other side, the number of people who are living paycheck to paycheck is only rising each year.

It seems like the American economy is broken for the young people.

If you are in your 20s and 30s, most likely you will struggle, and your parents, your father, and your grandfather had it much easier.

If you look at the numbers, buying a house and building a decent life and having a comfortable life back in the 1960s and 70s was way easier than its today.

American government systematically over the last 50 years has been destroying the middle class and probably purposefully has created the biggest wealth inequality humanity has ever seen.

And as I dig deep into this topic, I found out that the situation is way worse than it seems.

I know that at first glance, that seems like a conspiracy theory.

If you don't believe me, let me show you. 1940s and 1970s was the golden era in American history where the average income could afford you to pay your basic necessities and also buy a house.

The great thing about houses is that for almost all of history, it was the main tool to build wealth.

So if your income allows you to buy a house, you buy your house.

Even if you get a mortgage and house prices are affordable and you can't pay off your mortgage much earlier, as time goes by, even if there is inflation, the value and price of your house keeps rising.

And if you build your first property, that will make it easier to buy your second property and then the third property and over time you are simply going to get wealthier.

The people who purchased properties back in the 1960s and 70s for 10 to 20 thousand dollars, these properties, the exact same houses today worth 2 to 3 million dollars.

But this was only possible because the United States was the main driver engine of the global economy.

You see, between 1939 and 1970, without the fault of the United States, the United States was in a very unique position.

You can see that exports of the United States has skyrocketed to levels that we haven't actually seen, even though the rest of the world was as advanced as the United States.

And that's because the rest of the world was going through world war 2 and it was actively destroying itself.

And they needed to finance their wars, they needed to feed their armies, they needed to manufacture equipment and weapons to ensure that they win the war.

You have the United States at the center, and then you have all these countries are fighting each other, and all of them buying things from the United States.

While goods are coming out of the United States, money is coming into the United States.

So it doesn't matter what business you did back in the 1940s and 50s.

If the US market is too competitive, just export your product to European Union, to Japan, China, it doesn't matter, you have the entire world as one giant single market.

And they are very ready to buy those things from you.

And back in the days, they paid you in gold and not just pieces of papers.

And even when the world was over, most of these countries needed decades to rebuild their economies.

France and Germany, the UK was entirely demolished in world war 2.

China was fighting a war with Japan and then a civil war.

That's why both of these nations were entirely destroyed, even the Soviet Union.

So the United States emerged as this single power that supplied the rest of the world with industrial goods as they started to build their economies.

So if you are in the UK back in 1950s, you need equipment, you need companies, you need technology, and all of that was imported from the United States.

And that's why it doesn't matter what business you did back in 1950s and 60s, you could make a lot of money.

But the US economy is still growing until today.

So if prices are rising on one side and wages are growing on the other side, we should have the exact same economic model.

That since then, inflation has been at around 2.5%.

Yes, there has been some spikes back in 1970s and 80s, but nonetheless, it calmed down and the average inflation historically was at about 2.5%.

And if you that to wages, wages have been growing faster than inflation.

For example, back in the 1990s, wages have been growing at about 5.5% when inflation was at about 5%.

So the average American shouldn't have actually gotten poorer.

But if you look at the numbers, life just got a lot harder and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.

Why numbers are showing to us that the average American got wealthier, while in reality, the average American got significantly poorer.

That's because the United States pulled one of the biggest scams in the history of humanity.

You see, back in 1971, the United States entered a new era.

That allowed the government to print money essentially as much as they wanted.

In fact, they printed more money even before 1971.

And that's when they realized that if we do not get out of this gold standard, because we cannot possibly back all of this gold with real money.

So they abolished the gold standard and they started massively printing money.

But if you think about it, it's supposed to create massive inflation.

But if you look at the numbers, we did not have massive inflation except back in the 1970s.

That's not because it did not create massive inflation, that's because we simply changed the way we calculate inflation.

You know, they say that it doesn't matter how you vote, it matters how they count it.

It doesn't matter how much the real inflation is, it matters how they count inflation at the end of the day.

So the first thing they did is they removed housing from inflation.

So if house prices, for example, increased by 10% annually, then that would be part of inflation.

Because for the vast majority of people, unless you are super rich, housing makes up a huge portion of your expenses.

But when you print so much money, a house is an asset.

So the government is like, let's stop including housing prices into inflation numbers and change it to something like a housing equivalent to owning a house.

Suddenly, inflation numbers started to come down.

But the second main adjustment that they made was that hedonic adjustment.

So basically, they came up with a very simple argument that if the quality of the product is improving, and the price has increased alongside the quality, then that's not inflation.

If we increase the quality of your camera next year, and we increase the price, well, technically, the price of iPhone has increased.

But in the eyes of inflation, it did not because the quality of the camera increased.

So that increase in price simply reflects a better quality.

For example, if we increase the camera, but the price of iPhone stayed the same, then that's what we call deflation.

So basically, in the eyes of people who calculate and do the math for inflation, since 1970s and 80s, as the quality of technology kept improving, they do not count that as inflation.

Yes, every single year, car prices are rising.

So if you buy the same Toyota next year, it will cost a little bit more.

If you buy the same BMW model, it will cost you slightly more.

But it's not reflected in the inflation numbers because inflation numbers say, the latest BMW has additional features that justify the price, so that's not inflation.

And suddenly, if you look at it from that perspective, we don't have any inflation at all.

If a hospital, for example, improves the quality of the service and raises their prices, it is not inflation because the simply is providing a better service.

Or if we are improving the quality of a technology, and we are producing it on mass scale, and the price per unit has decreased, then we are going to count that as deflation, and suddenly inflation numbers drop.

So in reality, when you look around, the cost of living could rise by 10-20%, but then the inflation report it has only increased by 2.5%.

So if we actually look at inflation numbers from that perspective, suddenly we realize that the average wage has grown by 3-4% since 1960s and 70s.

According to them, inflation has increased by 2-3%.

So wages on average has been growing by an extra 1 percentage point, so the average American today should be living and should wealthier than the average American back in 1960s and 70s.

But if you look at the real life, you will find out that the average American today, or more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck than they did back in 1960s and 70s.

And that's because the real inflation, if we count it the way it is, by including, for example, house prices and also not making the hedonic adjustments, then the real inflation is anything between 7-10%.

And according to some experts, it might be even higher than 10%.

And now look at the situation from this perspective.

Over the last 60 years, wages have been growing by 3-4%, but the real inflation has been growing by 7-10%.

A single year won't make a huge difference, but over the course of 50 years, each year compounds, and that's why life became so difficult and basically the idea of even owning a house became unrealistic and is becoming unrealistic for more and more people.

Personal income back in 1981 was adjusted to inflation, after counting inflation, was a little over 26K.

Fast forward to 2024, that number has grown to 45K.

And looking at this number alone, you can make a claim that the average American today a far wealthier life than the average American back in 1981.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Something’s Going Seriously Wrong in United States

perspective

massive

decent

opportunity