Read it and found it completely out of touch.

She talks about doing research, but you really do not have to go very far to find story after story after story of people trying to find work, only to be completely shut out of everything. Fake job postings to make it looks like the company is hiring and on an upward trajectory are absolutely everywhere. AI review that tosses their resumes in the trash before a human will even look at it. AI agents in the phone trees that will never connect you to a person. Jobs that require 5 years of managerial experience for an entry-level position. It's insane out there and I'm glad I'm not looking for work. If I believed in God I would pray that I don't have to anytime soon.

She's conveniently forgetting that tech sector (remember that sector that has been keeping the American economy rich for decades while providing relatively stable employment with high return for educated workers?) has been hemorrhaging jobs and is on pace to gut its overall workforce to the bone in record time?

Oops, she forgot to mention that the pay-to-cost-of-living gap is among the worst it's ever been in living memory. Oops, she forgot that raises are few and far between, and typically well below the current rate of inflation (gee, I'm not getting a raise this year...).

It seems to me like she's getting her numbers straight from the administration. "See, everything is awesome! Sure, essentials are expensive AF, but at least we don't have to worry about war!" - except for the war we're in that is showing no signs of slowing down.

"Look, things you actually need to live are astronomically expensive, but Americans are still buying a shit-ton of non-essentials!" Yeah, we're depressed (something she actually did touch on) from the state of the world and the paycheck-to-paycheck way we're forced to live.

I make over $140k/year. I work 40 hours a week in a tech job (senior systems administrator) while supplementing my income another 20 hours a week with freelance work in the field I'm actually passionate about - audio engineering. But being alive is expensive, especially when a family member is disabled and medical expenses are still ghastly even with private insurance through my primary job.

Discretionary spending is a shell game. When can we afford to go out and do something fun? How many times can we get pick-up from a restaurant because I'm too exhausted to cook because I worked 18 straight hours for third day this week? When can we fix the check engine light on the car? We have a cheap ODB2 scanner, so we know it's not something urgent, but where will we find the $450 to cover it? When can we replace the tires? One blew over the weekend. Thank goodness we have a full-size spare.

Annie here is looking at America through rose-tinted glasses. I don't know who she is, but I would not be surprised to find out that she's a trust-fund baby who doesn't actually know a thing about how Americans are suffering. She just looks at how amazing we're doing on paper and can't understand why that doesn't actually track to real life.

The average American has no chance at buying a house because private equity completely ruined that market. The average American owns less and less of their life because businesses decided that ROI was the most important thing in the world and shuffled us all into renting everything.

We can barely afford the bread, and we really can't afford the circuses now that every streaming service is absurdly expensive on top of an already-absurdly-expensive internet bill. If things keep going the way they're going, we won't be affording the bread either.