Trump Lets WORKERS STARVE While Jetting With Billionaires?!

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Americans are trying to work more hours to keep up as gas and food prices rise.

[00:00:05]Even so, real average weekly earnings decrease. You are not alone. You are working more hours to make ends meet and you are bringing in less money when you adjust for inflation. Covering what the corporate media covers up. Hey, it's JT Suscowski with Status Coup. The fat cats are getting fatter while you can't afford to eat. And all the while, the people's president, the anti-establishment pick, Donald Trump, is busy stuffing his suitcase on his way off to China with every CEO he can get his hands on. And those CEOs, make no mistake, will be the ones pulling the strings on Trump in China. We'll get to that in just a minute. But right now, the economy is cratering for working people. But the rich, the powerful don't care because it couldn't be going better for them. I want to start here by highlighting this post from Heather Long, an economist who said, "Just in, inflation is now eating up all wage gains for the first time in about three years. This is painful for Americans and a true financial squeeze." And right below that, she cites most recent inflation data for the last year is 3.8% while wages have only gone up 3.6%. So, if you have been working hard this time and you feel like in the last year you haven't been able to get ahead of prices, well, you're not crazy and you're not alone. The vast majority of Americans are feeling the exact same squeeze where prices are accelerating faster than your wages are. So, you are doing the same amount of work and falling even further behind. But don't worry, the White House's senior economic advisor, Kevin Hasset, says that's actually part of the system. Americans are paying more for gas and they're paying more for everything else as well.

[00:01:52]Isn't that fantastic? We've got people doing all of this spending. This was him in his own words on Fox. In fact, I had the head of one of the big five banks in my office yesterday going through the credit card data. And just as Secretary Bessant said, uh, credit card spending is through the roof. They're spending more on gasoline, but they're spending more on everything else, too. And so, in terms of the jobs picture for the rest of the year, you know, it's really hard to see having uh the unemployment rate go up, for example. It's probably going to drop a little bit, but it's already very close to to full employment.

[00:02:24]>> And don't worry, AI isn't coming for your jobs either. While I was prepping for this segment, I just at the very last minute found this story from CNBC.

[00:02:34]Hasset says, "AI isn't costing anybody their job right now, but tech layoffs keep coming. So don't worry. AI is going to take your job, and you're going to keep spending more for goods, and the economy, meaning rich people's economy, will be doing all the better for it. So don't worry about it. Try not to think about it. In the meantime, Donald Trump isn't trying to address your concerns or your economy. He's busy trying to plate the billionaires and tech CEOs who he is off to China with right now. This is more reporting from CNBC where they say President Donald Trump has invited executives for some of the biggest US companies including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Black Rockck CEO Larry Think, and Boeing CEO Kelly Otterberg to join his trip to China this week, according to a White House official. Also expected to join Trump's delegation for meetings with Chinese President Xihinping are executives from Blackstone, Cargill, Cityroup, Coherent, GE, Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illuminina, Mastercard, Meta Platforms, Micron Technologies, Qualcomm, and Visa just to name a few.

[00:03:47]Notice there that there is no representation for the vast majority of working Americans. Where is the representation from say a labor union that wants to try and fight to try and keep US jobs in the US?

[00:04:04]That's not there. Where is the labor secretary?

[00:04:08]Not on this list. Where is the person who is going to stand up for working Americans? I guess that falls to Donald Trump. a billionaire who has been enriching himself off of his own presidency while at the same time driving up all of these prices that we were just talking about. We're going to talk about more here in just a second.

[00:04:25]But Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Frink, Kelly Oderberg, and more are all going to be there fighting for what? Fighting for their corporate interests. trying to drive down the cost of labor for themselves, meaning offshoring more American jobs despite what this president promised now in both of his administrations, which is to bring jobs and money back to the United States of America. While at the same time, all he has managed to do is wage a broad inflation inflationary trade war with the entire world that has left you screwed over.

[00:05:05]And here is just one way that that looks right now. Again, from Heather Long, Americans are trying to work more hours to keep up as gas and food prices rise.

[00:05:16]Even so, real average weekly earnings decreased in April as inflation ate up all the wage gains and extra hours worked. Real weekly earnings for all workers was negative. % in April and real weekly earnings for rank and file workers, meaning the vast majority of us, was actually negative.3% in April. So, you are working more." And she went on to just cite some stuff from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So, Trump's own Bureau of Labor Statistics, which would only want to warp these numbers in favor of Trump. But that aside, you are working more hours if you have been working more hours to try and make ends meet. Again, you are not alone. You are working more hours to make ends meet and you are bringing in less money when you adjust for inflation. You are losing money ma working more hours because of the way this economy is driving up the prices.

[00:06:10]And one of the ways that money is likely going out the door for you is spending on your car. You probably have massive auto loans like a lot a lot of Americans do. This is from Dominic Michael Trippy who says new auto loan and credit card delinquencies in the US reach an all-time high while stock market also nears record highs according to CNBC data. That is that two economies that I'm talking about. You have the all-time highs in the stock market for the rich, for the people who can afford to put real sums of money into the stock market. Your 401k, your pension, that is something else entirely. That is just for little old you. You are not going to retire any sort of billionaire because of the little amount of money you have been able to put aside for retirement.

[00:06:59]If you've been able to save for retirement at all. No, the billionaires, the multi-millionaires in this world, the true 1% or.1% in this country are doing fantastic because they live off of generational wealth that they don't even have to work for. They can just let their money work for them in the stock market. Stock market number go up, they're happy.

[00:07:20]Whereas you, the average working person, are facing record levels of autoloan and credit card delinquencies. And it's that auto loan figure that I want to talk about next, because this is reporting from Fortune magazine. Americans owe $1.68 trillion on car loans, more than credit card debt, and as much as all federal student loan debt, as well. Roughly one in four Americans are paying off auto debt, according to a report published Wednesday by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and are overall on the hook for a record 1.68 trillion in car loans or outstanding payments.

[00:08:00]Those figures out auto lo put auto loans on par with all outstanding federal student loan debt, 1.69 trillion of federal debt and $1.84 trillion in total and ahead of credit card balances, $1.28 to 8 trillion outstanding as of last year. It's the end result of years of rising prices for cars, an item that has fast outpaced inflation since the pandemic. And you can't get by in this world without a car. We have built a country that is dependent on cars. You can't get to your job likely without a car because of the sorry state of public transportation in this country. So, we're going to jack up the prices on something that you need as much as a roof over your head to be able to keep your job and be able to afford the rest of your staggering bills that you face here in the US. We're going to drive up the prices on that so that way you have to struggle to make ends meet on everything else. And I want to point out that that eyepopping figure here, the 1.68 $68 trillion in in car loans.

[00:09:05]President Donald Trump just proposed a $1.5 trillion line in the federal budget. That being for defense, not for debt relief for Americans. He could almost wipe out that entire figure on car loans, almost wipe out student loan debt. he could wipe out all Americans credit card debt with the amount that he is proposing spending on America's military going by more than half a trillion dollars increasing by more than half a trillion dollars that defense spending budget more than a 50% increase so much of an increase that the reporting is that the Pentagon doesn't even know how to spend all of that money and he's going to funnel it into defense because he thinks it's a winning issue that Americans just want to bomb more girl schools overseas while they themselves drown here in credit card debt. But at least maybe you have a car.

[00:09:55]You can live out of that car because you're not going to be able to buy a house. Again, the vast majority of you are not buying houses. And that is belied by some of the home seller data which I have right here. Breaking US housing market. This from bar chart.

[00:10:11]Home sellers now outnumber buyers by 630,000.

[00:10:15]the largest gap ever, ever recorded since they've been tracking these metrics. And there you see on the chart here, I know it's kind of small on screen, so I'll read it off for you.

[00:10:28]There's 1 point basically 2 million sellers. There's only 1.3 million buyers. 630,000 gap between those two numbers, which is very different than where the housing market was just a few years ago, where there were many, many more buyers during the Biden administration than there were sellers. And that was a problem in the other direction where home prices just accelerated because there were so many people looking to buy homes. Now, everyone is finding themselves priced out and unable to save for a home because of all of these other costs that we have been talking about.

[00:11:05]And if all of this makes you feel very pessimistic about the state of the economy, again, you are not alone.

[00:11:10]Because as much as the CNBC types, the Fox Business types, the millionaires and billionaires in this country want to point to things like uh the unemployment rate in this country, things like GDP or the stock market highs, these these metrics that really don't tell the full picture. They tell the story of how corporate entities are doing right now in terms of the economy. Corporations doing swell don't tell you how workers are doing. One metric that I think does is the consumer sentiment index that's tracked by the University of Michigan.

[00:11:43]Well, guess what? It just hit an near all-time low. Americans have never been more worried about the economy. The consumer sentiment index fell by 1.7 points in May to 48.2, an all-time low.

[00:11:56]This comes as current conditions dropped 4.7% or 4.7 points to 47.8, also a record low. Furthermore, the perceived financial situation among Americans declined to the lowest since 2009, since the depths of the financial crisis. As a result, the consumer sentiment index is now negative 13% below the 2008 financial crisis low. By comparison, during the 1980s recession, this metric bottomed at 52 points.

[00:12:27]Consumer sentiment is at crisis levels.

[00:12:30]And this is the chart of that consumer sentiment index. You don't really need to know much about the numbers other than the lower this line goes on the chart, the more pessimistic people are feeling about the state of the economy.

[00:12:41]And it is at an all-time low for tracking this number. And that includes tracking through the Great Recession.

[00:12:49]These are the actual the real economy.

[00:12:51]The people who can't afford their cars.

[00:12:53]The people who can't afford to buy homes. The people who are screwed over while Trump takes billionaires on a corporate on a corporate mission to China to try and secure more low-wage work for themselves and more offshoring of US jobs. This is the real economy.

[00:13:12]This is the kind of economy we report on here at Status Coup and we talk to regular everyday people about how they are doing. We go on the ground to ask these questions. I'm doing more on the ground reporting on this. Tomorrow, tomorrow I will be in the streets, but that work is expensive. If you want to support this kind of independent on the ground, real economic justice journalism, go to statuscoo.com/join.

[00:13:37]For as low as $5 a month, you go to keep us completely editorially independent, free from these corporate influences that that taint other media outlets and and very much warp what they are allowed to report on.