Posted on 10/20/2025 9:23:58 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
By the time the Pilsen Food Pantry opened on a recent morning, Ulysses Moreno had been there for two hours — with a line of people behind him that snaked around the corner.
“This is a lifeline for me,” said Mr. Moreno, 39. He had lost his construction job a few days earlier, and with three teenagers at home, he wanted to make sure he could stock up. “Our food budget doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.”
A few miles away, on Chicago’s glitzy Magnificent Mile, luxury hotels are bustling. Jewelry stores and designer boutiques do brisk business. The restaurants are packed with diners sipping $20 cocktails while they wait for tables.
To Evelyn Figueroa, a family physician who founded and runs the Pilsen pantry, the dichotomy is striking.
“For people like me, who are homeowners, who are employed, the economy is great,” she said. “How is the economy? It depends who you’re looking at.”
The divide between rich and poor is hardly new, in Chicago or the rest of the country. But it has become more pronounced in recent months. Wealthier Americans, buoyed by a stock market that keeps setting records, have continued to spend freely. Lower-income households — stung by persistent inflation and navigating a labor market that is losing momentum — are pulling back.
The top 10 percent of U.S. households now account for nearly half of all spending, Moody’s Analytics recently estimated, the highest share since the late 1980s. Consumer sentiment has climbed among high earners but steadily fallen for other groups.
“This isn’t just an inequality story — it’s a macroeconomic story,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group. “As the wealthy continue to consume, that’s masking more and more insecurity and instability in the economy under...”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
In other breaking news from the Times, water is wet...
The bee!, huh, what?
People with money, have money.
People without money, don’t have money.
First time ever.
Let's start there.
This is not new.
In one sense, this is the story that the Times trots out every time a Republican is president. The rich get richer while the poor are struggling. Insert pertinent statistic here to support the template article. But in another sense, the reason someone like Mamdani has traction is because basics are so unaffordable in a lot of places - primarily large, Dem-run cities. The solution to the problem that the Times raises is not the solution that their liberal ideologue reporters want to hear.
Well, now ... we can't have that. That creates jobs for the people who make stuff.
Really?
Never happened once from 2017 through early 2021. Homelessness, inflation, and debt emerged like Athena from Zeus’ head on 1/20/2025.
The magic of TDS!
I’d like to know how much Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group gets paid every year.
What do you want them to do? Horde their money?
Maybe poor people are poor because they make bad choices. The used Tundra I bought was already four years old with 30K on the clock and it will outlast the above by decades. Paid a third of what the dealers are selling the repo'd aforementioned.
Don’t use cherry-picked examples. Use aggregate data supplied from published sources. Unemployment rates, GDP, economic growth, and other macro measures say you are using biased and uncommon data for your argument. Also, don’t forget, the income distribution is a snapshot of things at a point in time. The burger flipping teenager in the lower 5% of the income distribution might well be the man with a dozen McDonald’s restaurants ten years from now and in the upper 5% of the distribution. Unless you have a perfectly even distribution of income (pure Communism, which has never existed), there will always be someone who is “poor”. “Poor” in the US is wealthy in dozens of other nations around the world.
“Wealthy Americans are spending - those with less are struggling”
I’m shocked
I recall in Bernard Goldberg’s book “Bias”, there is a chapter titled “How Bill Clinton Cured Homelessness” or something like that. Once he was President, the media did not seem to pay attention to an issue like that, as opposed to when Reagan and later GHWB were in office.
The line outside of a food bank is not a sign of economic conditions. I don’t go to food banks but I have driven by them over the years and you would not believe the cars waiting for free food. Im talking Mercedes Tesla Escalades BMW. Everyone wants free food.
Ever was it thus...
Ever will it be...
Under socialism just the labels change !
“ The top 10 percent of U.S. households now account for nearly half of all spending”
The same top ten percent also pays 50 percent of the taxes.
Exactly.
My wife and I have always lived within our means, saved, purchased mid-range cars with cash, paid off our mortgage in half the time (on a 30 year) by paying an extra $100 a month towards the principal on the mortgage, and we purchased a modest house in a blue collar town (granted, that was all we could afford back in 1988...a BAD time to take out a mortgage!)
Never had cable. Ever.
We always planned for an event where if one of us lost our job, the other could meet our obligations, even if it was a debilitating event.
We have always had a plan on how to rapidly cut down on expenses, even to the point of cutting out subscriptions, going bare bones on utilities, etc.
When I see people who say they are having trouble making ends meet, questions like yours are the first ones I ask.
Especially when it is the New York Times writing about the hardship during a Republican administration.
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