The American Dream-On

If  you’re still scratching your head about how November’s mayoral election turned out in New York, you can stop. The reasons for electing an avowed socialist to lead the nation’s financial capital should now be clear to anyone not willfully blind to demographics, economics, and post-WWII American history.

The lessons New Yorkers are about  to  learn—“good and hard,” to borrow from H.L. Mencken—are not distant abstractions: People in Kansas City should be able to relate to the rotting of the Big Apple, brought to you in part by Zohran Mamdani’s commitment to free bus transit (tried in Kansas City; failed) and municipally run grocery stores (also tried in Kansas City; also failed).

It’s almost enough to make one wonder which of our misguided policies will show up next on the agenda there. Or worse, what inspirations the new mayor harbors that could make their way backhere.

Post-mortems on the election showed that huge numbers of New Yorkers under 30 enthusiastically embraced Mamdani’s redistributive agenda. (Note to savvy investors: Go long on U-Haul shares.) But, really…why?

Part of the answer reveals itself in a recent survey by an outfit called Talker Research. It polled 2,000 employed  Americans—key word: employed; these are producers, not takers—and found that nearly half of the average worker’s paycheck is gone within 48 hours of bank deposit.

Think about that. It means that a growing number of employed Americans are no longer living paycheck-to-paycheck, but more like hour-to-hour. And it’s not spent on luxuries, but on immediate, non-negotiable essentials like groceries, rent, utilities, and debt. Forget the Gen-Z stereotyping. This is not a crisis fueled by $8 frappuccinos and avocado toast at $15 a plate.

Not so long ago, protesters massed on the streets of Kansas City to demand a Living Wage of $15 an hour. The fact is, even $20 an hour today won’t buy much of a living. But skip past those lower-wage jobs. Consider the bright, young college-educated professional earning six figures. With no itemized deductions, someone in that $100,000 cohort is getting tagged for nearly $26,000 in federal, state and local income and FICA taxes.

You’re now at $74,000 a year. A shade over six grand a month. Not bad, eh? Whoops: what about rent? In Kansas City, that’ll average about $1,200 for a one-bedroom apartment. Then come groceries (low-end U.S. average for one person: $400 a month), utilities (gas, electric, water, phone, Internet), at least another $400. Car payment? Even $250 a month on a beater isn’t $250 total: insurance will likely run you another $150, and you’ll probably spend the same on gas. That car now takes a $550 bite every month. If you try to sock away 6 percent of your pretax into a 401(k) to qualify for a 50 percent company match on contributions, slice off another $300 a month. 

You’re now at $3,200 a month for the basics, putting you at about $2,800 before we even touch on school loans, health insurance and maybe a few bucks in the plate at church on Sundays. 

Even if you end up with $1,500 a month in “disposable” income, it’s pretty easy to see that financial ruin is just one car accident or one unexpected diagnosis away. Forget those worst-case scenarios, though: This rolls back on service industries—banks that make loans, wealth-management firms looking for clients, restaurants and bars that are already crowd-starved, and the travel sector, among others.

And those folks are the six-figure dynamics. Even if someone is knocking down $20 an hour for a full-time job and a 20-hour weekly side gig, they’re a far cry from 100k a year before that vicious rent/grocery/food/utilities cycle is triggered.

Saving 20 percent down to buy a home? Are you kidding? No wonder this generation feels like the American Dream has been consigned to history.

As we focus on philanthropy in this issue, on both corporate and personal levels, philanthropically minded owners of successful businesses might take a long, hard look at their compensation levels and think about ways to improve the lives of people right in front of them. Not as a matter of charitable giving, mind you, but from an understanding that we’re amidst a Great Recalibration of the social value of labor.

A lot of people are asking why the guy who delivers food to your grocery store, the stocker who shelves it or the cashier ringing it up earn so much less than someone in financial services pushing decimals around on a laptop. Groceries, you can eat. Decimal points, not so much.

Getting ahead of that social wave with compensation adjustments might be a very good business practice these days. And for those less philanthropically minded, perhaps it’s time to prep for some big policy changes coming down the pike, changes that might well resolve the issue of whether and how they should be charitable at all, and in what amounts. 

New York tells us that somebody else out there already has a plan for that giving. And you’re not part of the discussion.

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2025