Let me start with the good news, because there is some, and it would be irresponsible of me to bury it: the economy is booming. Record-shattering, champagne-uncorking, yacht-upgrading booming. Profits are up. The stock market keeps inventing new highs to faint at. Capital is being “returned to shareholders” at a pace that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush and quietly ask for tips.

The only catch, and I really do hate to be the one to mention it, is that the “shareholders” and “the American people” turned out to be two completely different mailing lists. And only one of them got the memo that times are good.

So let’s talk about who’s actually paying for the party.

First, the part where they tell you it’s fine

You’ve heard the line. The economy is strong. The fundamentals are solid. Wages are growing. And technically, on a chart, in a certain light, if you squint past the part where your grocery bill tried to mug you, some of that is even true.

Here’s the version they don’t put on the chyron. Inflation hit 3.8 percent for the twelve months ending April 2026, the hottest reading since 2023, climbing from 3.3 percent the month before. Energy costs jumped nearly 18 percent year over year, the steepest annual spike since 2022, with gasoline up over 28 percent because an oil shock from the war with Iran decided to set up permanent residence in your gas tank. Beef? Up almost 15 percent. The “basket of goods” economists love to reference has quietly become a basket of fewer goods, costing more, and you’re supposed to feel grateful it still fits in the car.

But the truly cinematic detail, the part you should tattoo somewhere visible, is this: for the first time in three years, inflation is eating all of your wage gains. Real average hourly earnings actually fell 0.3 percent over the year. Not “grew slower.” Fell. You got a raise and the economy pickpocketed it on the walk back to your desk. As one economist put it bluntly, there’s a real financial squeeze underway, and it’s hitting middle and lower-income households hardest, and, in a rare moment of honesty from people whose job is reassurance, “they know it.”

You’re not imagining it. You’re not bad with money. You’re just standing downstream of a system that’s been very carefully engineered to flow the other direction.

The tariffs: a tax with a flag on it

Now, about those prices.

When you put a tariff on imported goods, here is what does not happen: a foreign country does not sadly write a check to the U.S. Treasury and apologize for its competitiveness. That’s the fairy tale. What actually happens is that the company importing the goods pays the tax, and then, in a stunning display of generosity, passes it directly on to you at the register. A tariff is a sales tax wearing a patriotism costume.

And the costume is expensive. The Tax Foundation, which is not exactly a hotbed of radical leftism, estimates the tariffs amount to the largest U.S. tax increase as a share of GDP since 1993, working out to an average of around $1,200 to $1,500 per household in 2026 depending on which levies survive the courts. The Yale Budget Lab pegs the hit at hundreds to well over a thousand dollars per household, and noted that if certain tariffs are made permanent the annual burden balloons into the thousands. The Council on Foreign Relations put the real-income loss at roughly $1,681 per household. Coffee went up 34 percent in a single year. Furniture and cabinets are carrying a 25 percent surcharge, which is a fun thing to discover when you just wanted a place to put your plates.

So to summarize the trade policy: it was sold as toughness on foreign nations, it functions as a tax on your own citizens, the costs fall across every income group, and, in a detail you’ll be shocked to learn, the top 1 percent take the smallest hit to their after-tax income of anyone. Funny how that keeps happening. Almost like it’s not an accident.

And then there’s the war

Nothing says “stable economy” like an oil shock, and the war with Iran has been kind enough to provide one. Energy prices are up double digits, gasoline surged past 28 percent year over year, and economists are gently warning that even if tankers start moving through the Strait of Hormuz again tomorrow, it could take months for the supply chain to untangle and prices to settle.

Wars are many things. Tragic. Destabilizing. Morally enormous. But they are also, reliably, a wealth transfer machine. Energy companies post windfall quarters. Defense contractors update their guidance upward. And the cost, the actual dollars-and-cents cost, gets socialized straight down to the person filling up a Honda Civic to get to a job whose paycheck just lost a fight with the price of eggs.

You are paying for this. Not metaphorically. At the pump, this week.

Now for the windfall. Brace yourself.

Here’s where it gets genuinely obscene, and I want you to hold the previous section in your mind while you read this one. Wages falling. Gas surging. Tariffs draining your wallet. A war in the background. Got it? Good. Now look up.

In the first quarter of 2026, major U.S. banks spent a record $33 billion on stock buybacks. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup all executed their largest repurchases ever. Why now? Because capital rules got “eased” under the current administration, freeing up billions, and the banks looked at all that freed-up money, considered lending it or, you know, paying workers, and instead funneled a hefty chunk straight into pumping their own stock price.

That’s not a one-off. Salesforce kicked off a $25 billion accelerated buyback in March 2026, the largest such transaction on record. Walmart authorized $30 billion. Apple repurchased roughly $94 billion of its own stock over twelve months, more than the next two companies combined. Across the S&P 500, buybacks are running past $700 billion and U.S. companies are now spending more buying back their own shares than they pay out in dividends. Projections had total buybacks hitting $1.1 trillion in 2025, an all-time high going back to when anyone started counting in 1982.

Let me explain the magic trick, because it’s important you see how the rabbit gets into the hat.

A buyback doesn’t make a company better. It doesn’t build a factory, hire a worker, lower a price, or invent a single thing. A company earns the same money, then buys up its own shares so that the same profit is divided among fewer slices. Earnings per share goes up. The stock price goes up. And because executives are paid largely in stock, their compensation goes up. The business didn’t improve. The metrics did. Critics call it “financial engineering,” which is a polite term for “making the number bigger without doing the work,” a privilege not extended to you when your landlord asks for rent.

And who catches all that beautifully engineered money? The wealthiest 10 percent of households own 88 percent of the stock market. The top 1 percent alone own 53 percent of it. Black and Latino families each hold about 1 percent, a figure that hasn’t moved in thirty years. So when you hear “the market hit a record high,” understand that this is, statistically, a private celebration you were not invited to. You just paid for the venue.

“But the profits will trickle down to workers”

They said this in 2017. They said the corporate tax cut would flow into wages, that giving companies more money would mean giving you more money, that the windfall would gently rain down upon the rank and file like a benevolent tax-advantaged mist.

Here’s the receipt. Since that 2017 tax law cut the corporate rate by two-fifths, the largest U.S. firms spent $3.2 trillion on stock buybacks and $2.1 trillion on dividends. One analysis of 280 large profitable corporations found their shareholder payouts outstripped what they paid in federal income taxes by seven to one. Apple’s buybacks jumped 134 percent in the five years after the law. The Fortune 100 alone cleared over $1.2 trillion in after-tax profit in a single year, $100 billion more than the year before, while their combined market value swelled toward $30 trillion.

The trickle, it turns out, trickled up. It always trickles up. Gravity works differently for money than it does for everything else, and the difference is called lobbying.

The promise was never really a forecast. It was a permission slip. “Let us keep more, and we’ll take care of everyone.” They kept more. The “everyone” part is still pending, and the check appears to have been written on a stock certificate that only clears in Greenwich.

Let’s connect the dots, since nobody on TV will

Put the whole picture on one table.

Your wages are losing to inflation for the first time in three years. You’re paying an extra thousand-plus dollars a year in tariffs that were marketed to you as patriotism. A war is keeping gas prices inflated and will for months. Meanwhile, banks are setting buyback records because regulators handed them a gift, companies are spending over a trillion dollars making their already-rich shareholders richer instead of investing or paying people, and the gains pool almost entirely among the top sliver of households who own nearly everything.

This is not a story about a bad economy. That’s the part the framing always gets wrong, and gets wrong on purpose. The economy is working beautifully. It is doing precisely what it has been tuned to do. The squeeze on you and the windfall at the top are not two separate news stories that happen to be running the same week. They are the same story, told from opposite ends of the pipe. The money leaving your gas tank, your grocery cart, and your shrinking real paycheck does not vanish. It goes somewhere. And we have the receipts for where.

When the same people who lowered their own taxes, eased their own rules, and engineered their own stock prices turn around and tell you to tighten your belt, understand that the belt is the product. Your discipline is their margin. Your “personal responsibility” is the load-bearing wall holding up someone else’s third home.

So what do you actually do with this

Get loud, but get specific. “The economy is rigged” is true and also easy to wave away. “Buybacks hit a record while real wages fell and I paid $1,300 more in tariffs” is harder to argue with, because it’s just arithmetic.

Know that being broke in this economy is not a personal failing, it’s a designed outcome, and there’s a meaningful difference between losing a fair game and being fleeced by a crooked one. The shame they want you to carry is just one more cost they’ve tried to offload onto you for free.

And stop accepting the framing. Every time someone says “the markets are strong” as if that’s good news for you, ask whose market, holding whose shares, bought back with whose money. You already know the answer. You paid for it.

The economy is fine.

It was just never built for you.