Part 1 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more.
A few years ago I started keeping a list.
It began with a conversation at the field after one of Henry’s games. A guy I have known for a decade — coaches another team, runs a small landscaping business out of his pickup, raised in Ulster County, lives in the same town I do — was telling me he had to drop his oldest kid’s travel team because the registration fee plus the equipment plus the tournament weekends had hit a number his household couldn’t carry that year. He was not asking for sympathy. He was matter-of-fact about it. He runs a business and pays attention to his books. The number didn’t work.
That conversation rattled around in my head for a few weeks, and then I started noticing the same conversation everywhere. The cashier at the hardware store skipping a dentist appointment. The neighbor across the road who had been a school librarian for twenty-three years and was thinking about taking a second job at the wine store. My contractor doing the math on whether his daughter could still afford the in-state public university his older two went through ten years earlier. None of these people are struggling because they made bad choices. They are mostly people who have been doing the same things their parents did, in the same places their parents lived, with similar levels of effort, and the math has gotten harder every year.
This series is my attempt to figure out why. Fifteen installments, each one looking at a specific place where the cost of being a regular working person in America has been quietly transferred from somewhere else onto the household. Housing. Healthcare. Higher education. Childcare. Cars. Retirement. The reasons all of these things changed are different, but the pattern is the same: a cost that used to sit somewhere else now sits on you.
This first one is just the picture. The math on a single American who is doing everything right. The rest of the series gets into how each piece of the math got that way, and who profited from it.
One person, doing everything right
I want to walk through the numbers for one specific case, because the abstractions don’t land until you see the actual receipt.
Take a thirty-four-year-old registered nurse at a regional hospital in North Carolina. Let’s call her Sarah because I don’t want to use a real person’s name, but she is a composite of two or three nurses I have spoken with and a lot of public data. She makes $77,000 a year — well above the national median individual income, comfortably middle of the road for her profession. She is single, no kids, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in a mid-sized city. She drives a paid-down used Civic. She meal preps. She does not have expensive taste.
After federal income tax, FICA, North Carolina state tax, and her share of the health insurance premium her employer offers, her actual monthly take-home is about $4,575. The $77,000 sticker is not the number she has to work with. That gap between what people think she makes and what she has to spend is about $22,000 a year, and that is before she pays for anything.
Then the bills come.
Her one-bedroom rent is $1,450, which is roughly the median for a one-bedroom in a mid-sized American city right now. Her healthcare costs run about $450 a month all in once you add her insurance premium, her HSA contribution for her deductible, her co-pays, and her dental and vision. Her car costs about $780 a month total — payment, insurance, gas, an average for maintenance and repairs. Her student loans from her BSN — $38,000, which is below the national average for a four-year degree — run her $340 a month for ten years. Food is about $450, which is roughly the USDA’s moderate-cost plan for a single woman, not lavish. Utilities and internet and her phone come to about $285. The non-negotiable stuff — toiletries, replacement scrubs, laundry, basic personal care — runs another $185.
Add it up and she is at $3,950 a month in mandatory spending. Her take-home is $4,575. She has $625 a month left for everything else.
Now the part most people miss. That $625 has to cover any retirement contribution (her employer offers a 401(k) but no match, so any of it is on her). Any savings toward eventually owning a home (the median home in her market is somewhere between six and seven times her annual salary, before mortgage interest). Any kind of emergency fund — the Federal Reserve documents about 40% of American adults do not have enough on hand to cover a $400 surprise expense. Any of the things that make a life feel like a life: a gym membership, a streaming service, a birthday gift for her sister, a flight home for Christmas, a weekend off, a hobby. And any actual medical event, because that $450 a month assumes she does not hit her $1,500 deductible, and the moment she does, her budget breaks.
She has done everything right. She has a respected profession. She makes substantially more than the median individual American worker. She is, by any measure that mattered to her grandmother, a success. And the math is so tight that one bad transmission, one bad mammogram, one bad month means the credit card comes out.
That is the spread for someone above the median. Half the country makes less than she does.
Sarah’s grandmother
Sarah’s grandmother was also a registered nurse. In 1975 she made about $11,000 a year, which is roughly $66,000 in today’s dollars after inflation. So in real terms, Sarah is making about 17% more than her grandmother did.
Her grandmother bought a house on that income. A small one — three bedrooms, one bath, on a city lot — but she bought it. The median home in 1975 cost about two and a half times the median household income. Today it costs somewhere between six and seven times.
Her grandmother had a pension. Sarah has a 401(k) she cannot afford to contribute to.
Her grandmother’s nursing school cost about $800 a year. Sarah’s BSN program at a state school cost $24,000 a year by the time she graduated, and the loans she took out for it follow her around like a chronic condition that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
Her grandmother had three weeks of paid vacation and unlimited sick days. Sarah has ten paid days off and a handful of sick days she has been told, informally, not to use unless it is serious.
Her grandmother’s healthcare was paid in full by her employer. Sarah pays $200 a month and has a high-deductible plan.
I am not nostalgic for 1975. I know the things 1975 was bad at. Sarah’s grandmother was a white woman, and the same job paid a Black woman in the same hospital meaningfully less. Women in nursing in 1975 ran into ceilings that have since been at least partially dismantled. Lots of things are better now than they were then, and I do not want to pretend otherwise.
But the specific economic deal — work a real job, support yourself, save for a house, retire with some dignity — was much closer to mathematically possible for someone in 1975 than it is for someone in 2025. The deal changed. And what I keep wanting to push back against is the framing that the people on the wrong side of the deal are somehow personally responsible for the deal.
Productivity went up. The money went somewhere.
Here is a number I keep coming back to. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis, from 1979 to 2024, worker productivity in the United States grew by 80.9 percent. Median worker compensation, adjusted for inflation, grew by 29.4 percent. Productivity grew 2.7 times faster than the pay of the people producing it.
That is not a small difference. That is the difference between a country where the median worker is roughly comfortable and a country where the median worker is one bad week from a debt spiral. The output went up. The pay did not follow.
The money did not vanish. Output that gets produced and not paid out as wages flows somewhere else — to executive compensation, to corporate profits, to shareholders. The same period that saw the median worker’s compensation grow 29 percent saw the top one percent of earners grow theirs 162 percent and the top one tenth of one percent grow theirs 301 percent, by EPI’s analysis of Social Security Administration data. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009, which means an entry-level worker today is making about 15 percent less in real terms than they were sixteen years ago without anyone changing a single line of policy. The decline of unionization — from over thirty percent of the workforce in the 1950s to about ten percent today — closed off the main mechanism workers used to keep their share of productivity gains. Right-to-work laws, mandatory arbitration clauses, non-compete agreements, the gig-ification of jobs that used to come with benefits — every one of these things shifts the bargaining floor down a little. Add forty-five years of small downward shifts and you get Sarah’s $625-a-month spread.
Where this series goes
The math is real. The receipts are public. The pattern is consistent. And the consequences are not falling on people who failed to do what they were supposed to do with their lives — they are falling on people I know in my town, and people I sat next to on planes when I was still flying to Los Angeles every six weeks, and people I have worked with at Crooked Number on embroidery runs, and people who used to report to me at NBC and were laid off in the same round I was. The math has gotten harder for all of them.
The remaining fourteen parts of this series take each piece of Sarah’s monthly budget and ask the same set of questions. How did this cost get this high? Who decided it would get this high? Who is collecting Sarah’s $625 a month? What changed between 1975 and now, and who voted for the change?
Some of the answers are going to be uncomfortable for one political party. Some are going to be uncomfortable for both. I am going to follow the receipts, and I am going to try not to flinch when they go somewhere I did not expect.
The premise of the whole series, which I want to be plain about at the start, is this: Sarah is not failing. The math is. And the math did not get this way by accident.
Even that's Odd 
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