The Terrible Cost Of Living Crisis In 2025

We just got the most recent inflation report. And so today I want to talk about that along with showing you guys and proving to you that wages have not been keeping up with inflation over the past 20 years and probably even longer than that. We're going to go back 20 years because at least that is pre-great financial crisis when things were sort of normal. But first, let's start off talking about the most recent inflation report because surprise, surprise, it is going up. Now, they do say, well, the latest inflation report from June was right in line with expectations, you know, but it was still a jump in the wrong direction. Well, yeah, no kidding. Any inflation reading going up at this point is in the wrong direction, especially since we've been promised for about three years now that it's supposed to go down back to 2%. So the CPI went up to 2.7% year over year in June, which is up from the 2.4% reading in May, which means that inflation from May to June went up 0.3% month over month, which is also the fastest increase that we've seen in the past five months. Core inflation is where they say it came in a little bit softer than anticipated. It came in at 2.9%, but they were expecting 3%. And remember, the core inflation is what the Fed looks at. That's the Fed's rate of saying, okay, this is the 2% that we've been looking for. Well, clearly they haven't gotten anywhere near that goal, considering it's still right at 2.9%, guys. And this inflation report also means that there is going to be zero chance that the Federal Reserve is going to cut interest rates at their meeting later this month. It's not going to happen. And you know, what's interesting is some people are blaming this on the tariffs, but this inflation reading is before most of the tariffs have even really gone into effect. So think about this. We're already seeing the inflation numbers move back up in the wrong direction before the tariffs take effect. So imagine what things are going to be like once they all actually go into full effect. If that were to happen, these inflation numbers are going to start spiking like you haven't seen since 2021. Now, what was the reason for this increase in inflation in June? Mainly higher food and energy costs. Wow. Two out of the three essentials that people need. Food and energy. The only thing missing here is the shelter. There was also clothing and furniture inflation in June. We had services inflation. And once the tariffs take full effect, if they do, we can expect to see all of these inflation figures skyrocket in the second half of 2025. Now on some things like furniture and apparel, the tariffs that are already in place right now are starting to slowly filter through to the core prices of these items. And the prices of these items did go up. And a lot of the experts say it's going to take months for the tariff data to start taking full effect on the inflation data. So let's assume all the tariffs do go into effect in August, like Trump is saying. Well, we probably aren't going to start seeing the true real impacts of that until the end of 2025, maybe even going into 2026. They'll start trickling into the numbers, but you won't see it really start to ramp up until about six months later. And this also reinforces the idea that the Fed will not be cutting rates anytime soon, or probably not at all this year if things remain on the current track. Now, check this out. Shelter prices went up 0.2% month over month in June, which was weaker than the 0.3% gain that we had in May. And the main reason why it didn't come in even stronger? Hotel prices. Why is this included with housing? I have no idea because that's temporary lodging. It's not even in the same category if you ask me, but this influenced it because the index for lodging away from home, which includes hotel prices, fell 2.9% month over month in June after declining 0.1% in May. So if it wasn't for that, we would have seen shelter prices rise substantially more. Food prices also went up 0.3% in June, which is the same increase that we saw in May of this year. Grocery prices rose 0.3% month over month. Prices for drinks, coffee, and produce were all up in June. Beef in particular was up 2% in just one month. Egg prices, however, did decline by 7.4% month over month in June. So at least finally, the egg crisis epidemic is over. But the cost of dining out went up. It went up 0.4% month over month. It went up 0.3% in May. And it went up 3.8% year over year. So it is getting more expensive to eat. It is getting more expensive to have a place to live. It is getting more expensive to put gas in your car. All of the things that everyone actually needs. It's getting more expensive to buy clothes. None of the important stuff is going down, guys. Having privacy these days, especially online privacy, is becoming an increasingly rare phenomenon, which is why today's video is sponsored by Delete.me. Delete.me is a hands-free subscription service that will remove your personal information that's being sold online. And Delete.me's privacy experts remove you from hundreds of data brokers all year long. And here's the perfect example. I've been working with Delete.me for over a year now. And you can see just in this most recent report I received from Delete.me, they reviewed over 12,000 listings on my behalf. And there were seven listings removed, which you might say that doesn't sound like a lot. But they have already removed hundreds of listings on my behalf from data brokers. And I just love that Delete.me is constantly working in the background to try and get your information removed from as many data brokers as possible and make sure that that data doesn't get repopulated once it is removed. So make sure to get 20% off your Delete.me subscription by joining today using my link down in the description below at joindelete.me.com slash board and arrow, or use the QR code on the screen. And that really brings me into the meat and potatoes I want to talk about, which is wages not keeping up with inflation. And I want to prove to you guys with some charts and some historical data that wages are not keeping up with inflation, regardless of what the Fed, the federal government, or any of your local congressman fraudsters tell you, it's not. I'm pretty sure most people intuitively know this just by looking at their financials today. Because unless you're somebody that owned some assets prior to the pandemic, you are probably now more broke than ever. If you owned assets prior to the pandemic, you were able to realize all of those gains in gold and silver, the stock market, housing prices, everything, Bitcoin. If you were lucky enough to own all four, you're practically rich right now if you owned it before the pandemic. Everyone else who didn't own these assets before the pandemic is suffering right now. But first let's define the basics here. Inflation measures how much prices go up over time, and wages are what people earn. And if wages don't rise as fast as inflation, workers lose purchasing power, meaning their money doesn't go so far anymore. I'm sure everyone can relate to that one now. Here's how wages and prices have stacked up since 2005. Let's go back 20 years from now. Overall, and we're going by the official government figures here, we know that the inflation numbers are much higher. So keep that in mind when we talk about inflation here. But overall, inflation has increased by about 64% in the last 20 years, according to the CPI, which is the Consumer Price Index. Those are the inflation figures we just went over, as well as the core inflation figures. But average hourly earnings for all private sector workers rose only about 53% over that same 20-year timeframe. So even though paychecks are bigger in terms of dollars, they don't buy as much as they used to. And that can be illustrated by the chart on the screen. The red line is inflation growth, and the blue line is wage growth over the same 20-year timeframe. And as you can see, the longer we go up this chart, the further away these two lines start to separate, which means inflation is becoming a bigger and more exponential problem as the years go by. And the problem is, we have stagnant real wages, because when we adjust for inflation, the picture looks even worse. Between 2005 and early 2020, real wages barely grew at all for many workers, and then the pandemic briefly boosted wages, but inflation quickly wiped out most of those gains, which brings us to today, where the real wages for many lower and middle-class income workers are now lower than they were in 2019. So even though people's paychecks are much larger today, five years after the pandemic, it is still smaller in terms of purchasing power, which is the real problem. This is the thing that everybody needs to understand about inflation. Regardless of how much money you have, the only thing that truly matters is how many products, services, and goods can that money really buy? And this is why I have told people repeatedly on this channel pretty much since the inception of my YouTube videos that you should own gold and silver. But this puts people in a situation now where people have to work harder and longer for paychecks that don't go as far. And there are some job fields that have suffered the most, like service workers, for example, like restaurant staff, retail, hospitality, low-wage healthcare jobs, transportation and warehouse workers, teachers and public employees whose pay hasn't kept up with the local pace of housing. And meanwhile, higher paid jobs in tech or finance have seen bigger raises, increasing the gap between the low and the high earners. Of course, a lot of people in those tech and finance jobs today are being laid off and losing their jobs. So why aren't the wages keeping up with inflation? Well, a lot of employers don't want to pay any more than they have to. They keep wage increases just high enough to keep people around, but low enough so it doesn't impact the company's profit margins too much. Also, union membership has declined dramatically, which has weakened workers' bargaining power over the years. There's also global competition, outsourcing that put downward pressure on wages, and now we have AI to contend with as well. And here's the reality of what many Americans are facing today. Groceries are up officially, right? Over 30% since 2019, but I think most people would argue that grocery prices are up anywhere between 50% and 100%, depending on which items we're talking about and where you live. That's been my own personal experience as well. Rents have surged anywhere between 25% and 40% in many cities across the country. You have used car prices, insurance, and utilities all higher than they used to be. And home ownership is completely out of reach for the vast majority of the population right now because people would have to spend about 45% of their income to afford the median price home today, which is beyond the debt-to-income ratios that most lenders will allow, which simply put means that most people cannot afford to buy a house. And this chart right here illustrates pretty good how much more money you have to spend today to basically buy the same items, okay? $150 worth of groceries is now $200 today. That's probably way underestimate. $500 in rent is more like $750 today. Gas, $100 before is more like $150 now. Utilities has seen the smallest increase, depending on the utility. Health insurance, though, went from like $180 to $300 just for the same amount of insurance. And yet with all of this going on, economists are willing to tell people the bold-faced lie that wage growth is finally outpacing inflation in 2025. But the gaps from all the previous years and months when it hasn't has never been closed. So even if there's a few months here and there that they can point to and say, well, look, in April of 2025, wage growth outpaced inflation growth. Well, that's just dandy. What about the last 20 years, dude? That's what I got to say. So these small raises that people are getting these days is just nowhere near enough to keep up with inflation. And it's really sad, the predicament that it's putting a lot of American households in right now. A lot of people are honest, hardworking folks who now have to work more than one full-time job in some cases, or have to do gig work on the side. And they're sitting there wondering why they're still broke. This is why. It's because your government, the American government, has cheated you and has fooled you into believing that your raise is actually worth something when in fact, it's more worthless than ever. And if you're lucky enough to still have a job these days, say you work at Starbucks corporate, well, they just changed the rules on everybody and said starting in September, you're going to have to come into the office not three days a week, but four days a week. Yet another company rolling back the work from home stuff. Pretty much just one day a week, you're going to be allowed to work from home moving forward. Check this out. We got Thanksgiving dinner crossing the road. That's a lot of them. There's more of them over here. Turkey, turkey. So this new Starbucks in the office mandate applies to their Seattle and Toronto offices, as well as all of their regional offices in North America, but it doesn't apply to the UK offices. So I guess people in the UK are still going to be able to get away with murder a little while longer. And this is a big deal because Starbucks has 16,000 corporate employees worldwide. So a lot of people are going to be affected by this. And Starbucks has seen a lot of trouble these days, especially when they stopped allowing people to walk in and use the bathroom without making a purchase. So they're yet another company that's trying to recover from a poor public image right now. And so a lot of these people end up quitting their job because they're like, I'm not going to go back into the office four days a week. But then they find out that they can't get another job without some serious struggles, especially if you had a management or middle management job. Because right now, a lot of the job cuts and layoffs are actually targeting middle managers, which is cutting the fat. It's getting rid of the middleman, literally. From May of 2022 to May of 2025, manager positions are down 6.1%, and executive level roles are also down 4.6%. We have big companies that are cutting managers right now, like Estee Lauder and Match. They cut 20% of their managers. UPS, Citigroup, Amazon, Google, they're also shrinking their middle management teams. And now a lot of these laid off middle managers are competing for fewer jobs out in the real world today. These people are finding high competition, ghosting from employers, and jobs requiring extensive experience, but offering lower pay. Kind of like what we just talked about. And part of the problem is a lot of these middle managers have identical resumes. Employers sometimes don't even show up to interviews, so they're really disrespecting people and their time. And a lot of people are now forced into a situation where they have to take lower titles and lower pay just to get a new job. About 22% of managers right now are accepting a pay cut, and 32% of managers are moving to individual contributor roles and taking pay cuts. So if you want to keep a job, this is kind of the situation you're in right now. And some managers who still are lucky enough to have a job are worried that they're going to be the next up on the chopping block, and that is a legitimate concern right now. So a lot of people are proactively hunting for a job right now while they're still employed. And of course, anybody who's heard me talk about the job market lately, the hiring process right now is an absolute mess, especially with AI. You know, people can use AI programs to apply to hundreds, if not thousands, of different jobs. And at the same token, employers are using AI to sift through those thousands of different applications, most of them never even being read by a human and never being considered by a human, leading to a situation where most people are just slipping through the cracks these days. Because of all the fake job postings, because of all of the fake bots that are applying for real jobs, it is just an absolute mess out there right now. I think what all these companies should do in order to resolve this issue is everybody needs to go back to going in person and handing in a handwritten resume in person, not even typed, handwritten. And the reason it needs to be handwritten is because then you can't use AI, or you could, but you would still have to copy things down yourself and write it down yourself, which would greatly reduce the amount of people out there applying for jobs who are not really looking for a job. And it would eliminate all of the bot applications because it needs to be a real person coming in and actually applying for the job. And of course, a lot of the middle managers who are losing their jobs right now are warning of why this could be a bad thing for businesses. They say that managers connect workers to leadership and the mission of the company, and without them, morale and engagement drop, which might be true depending on the company and the culture. Middle managers also mentor employees. They also act as a gut check between executives and junior staff. Essentially, they say that middle managers humanize leadership and connect strategy to people. And with AI and all the automation going on, you're seeing companies that are cutting staff even when things are profitable. Even companies that are doing good right now are able to let more people go due to all of the automation that's going on. In fact, 41% of employers plan to downsize with the help of AI by 2030. And some professionals fear that replacing middle managers with AI is a mistake and it's gonna lead to more problems than it solves in the end, which I think is definitely a possibility. That part I do agree with because letting AI just kind of take over and run things without anybody checking its work is a dangerous place to be in, guys. Here's one guy who said he applied for 750 jobs over the past two years, and he said there's movements out there, but it's hard to get noticed. And so what he started doing is freelancing instead and consulting in order just to stay afloat, you know, basically gigging for himself. And a lot of people though, once they start doing that, they realize that it presents a lot of good opportunities because now you're kind of working for yourself, you're working your own hours, taking the opportunities that you wanna take and kind of brushing off the ones that you don't, and it can actually be a blessing in disguise for some. And these layoffs are 100% real, guys. In fact, just today, Intel announced that they are gonna be slashing an additional 440 more jobs right here in the Bay Area in California, in Santa Clara, right where I saw the Metallica concert a few weeks back. And these are high paid individuals, sometimes middle managers that no longer have a job and are gonna be in this exact situation that I just described. And you know what the icing on the cake is for all of this? Well, from time to time, one of my subscribers, Alan, who works for a debt collection agency, he'll write me an update on what's going on out there in the world of debt collection. And guess what? It is busier than ever right now. Here's what he told me. The law firm that I work for has now added 20 new collectors in India just to handle the phone calls. From a collector on the phone point of view, that's about a one-third more collection staff just dedicated to calls, plus all the other support staff that they added in the past, because I have kind of talked about this story intermittently as he's written me updates over the past couple of years. And every time he writes me, he says that we just expanded office space. We're looking for new people. We have so much work coming in. We don't even have enough people for that work. So if you're somebody who just lost a job, debt collection's where it's at right now, guys. That shows you the state of the economy right there. People are losing jobs left and right, but the debt collection business is booming more than ever. He said that some of our clients are really pushing us to get 6,000 lawsuits a month, plus wage garnishments, and we are swamped with no signs of things slowing down. And I tell you this for two reasons. One, to warn you, if you are in debt and you think you're just going to get away without paying, these debt collectors are going to come after you and in some case, even garnish your wages. So don't think you're going to get out of it, especially with the student loan debt. And number two, if you need a job, this is a great place to look, guys. I know it might not be the thing that you want to do. It might not be your dream job being working for a debt collection agency, but you have to follow the money. And it's also proof that even in a bad economy like right now, where a lot of people are in financial trouble, there are still opportunity. And the opportunity is in collecting the debt that people are refusing to pay. So I hope you learned something from this video. I really worked hard on it to try to put together the best information I could and show you guys why the wages are not keeping up with inflation and why it's such a big problem. Don't believe the lies that the news and the government is telling you right now about this, because it is not true. Most people are aware of that just by looking at their wallets and their bank statements. So if you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to the channel. And if you don't want to wait for my next video to come out, check out this one on the screen right over here. And I'll see you in the next one.