The squeeze on American families is real, and John R. Puri cannot find it because he is counting the wrong family. In “Our Economic Past Was Not Always Greener”, he pulls the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey from 1972–73 to 2024, restricts it to one household type — married couples with children — and reports that clothing, food, entertainment, and transportation now eat smaller shares of household income than they did fifty years ago. Economic nostalgia, on his telling, is fiction. He picks the wrong family to count.
That restriction is not a footnote. It is the whole trick. The married couple with children was roughly two in five American families in the early 1970s. Today it is closer to one in five. The households that have grown since — single adults, single parents, childless couples, multigenerational families, roommates — never appear in his ledger at all. So he selects the household most likely to be stable, often two incomes, often already owning a home with a mortgage locked in back when rates were low, and announces that the middle class is fine. He does not count the family trying to buy a first home in 2026. He does not count the single parent paying rent on one salary. He does not count the childless couple under a decade of student debt. When you change the family, the story changes.
The move is also in the denominator. Puri tracks each category as a share of household income. When both incomes and the price of the essential thing rise together, the share can look flat while the burden soars. Take his housing number: 20 percent of pretax income, and he treats that as stable. Stable for whom? It is an average of households that already bought, many of them sitting on mortgage rates locked in at 3 or 4 percent. The family trying to buy a starter home today is financing a house at today’s rates on an asset that costs five or six times annual income, and far more in the coastal metros where most young adults actually live. In the mid-1980s that same ratio was closer to three times. The payment is not higher because of interest rates. It is higher because the underlying asset costs multiples more — because American communities spent forty years making small homes, small lots, duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes illegal to build through single-family-only zoning, minimum lot sizes, and parking minimums. Puri mentions this in passing and moves on. It is the story.
Then there is the part his chart cannot see. The BLS shelter figure counts mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance. It does not count principal repayment, which is where the actual purchase price lives. A family paying $1,500 a month in interest is also paying down several hundred dollars of principal that never shows up as consumption. Off the books sits the down payment that took a decade to save, the closing costs, and the equity locked into the house that could have started a business or funded a child’s college. Puri’s chart shows shelter spending rising from $11,468 to $20,522 — modest, he says. The unpaid number is the entry ticket that has priced out an entire generation.
Healthcare gets the same treatment. Puri concedes the share rose from 3.8 percent to 4.8 percent and files it away as an exception to an otherwise healthy ledger. It is not an exception. It is the headline. In absolute dollars the average family’s medical bills more than doubled, from $3,654 to $8,090. And the 4.8 percent counts only premiums and out-of-pocket spending. It does not count the wages siphoned into employer-sponsored insurance that would otherwise land in the paycheck: a worker earning $60,000 whose employer spends $15,000 on the family plan is functionally earning $75,000 in a world without that cost. That off-book burden is now larger than housing for many young families, and it does not appear in his chart.
Nor does he ask why the share rose. The answer is not that Americans grew greedier. It is that the insurance structure moved risk the wrong direction — off employers and group pools, onto family checking accounts. High deductibles, narrow networks, prior authorization, out-of-pocket maximums families actually hit. A family in the 1980s had a hospital stay and paid a modest deductible. A family today has a hospital stay and pays thousands before the insurance contributes a dime.
There is one more quiet move worth naming. Puri observes that more households now have two earners, which “naturally boost income,” and treats it as a gain. It is the opposite. A household that needs two paychecks to buy what one paycheck bought in 1972 has not gained purchasing power. It has bought back the same life at double the labor. And the second paycheck is not free either: a second car, more childcare, more restaurant meals, more takeout and delivery, more paid help with the work that used to get done at home. These are not luxuries. They are the cost of running a house where both adults work because one income no longer carries the rent. Puri counts them as additive. They are compensatory.
On one thing he is right, and it is worth conceding plainly. Groceries and clothing really are cheaper, in real terms and as a share of income, than they were in the early 1970s. Food at home fell from 9.2 percent of income to 5.5 percent, clothing from 5 percent to 1.9 percent. Cheap televisions and abundant chicken are genuine gains, and nostalgia that pretends otherwise genuinely misleads. Puri’s strongest point is exactly this one. It is also the smallest one, because cheap chicken was never what decided whether a family could afford to form.
The categories that decide that — housing, healthcare, childcare, education — are the ones that exploded. Puri celebrates the items that got cheaper and skips the items that gate a life.
So what do we build instead? The housing answer is known: legalize the fourplex on every residential lot, strip single-family-only zoning, repeal the minimum-lot-size and parking-minimum ordinances that make a starter home illegal to construct, let the duplexes and granny flats back onto the lots where they were banned out in the 1970s. The healthcare answer is known: price transparency, site-neutral payment, hard caps on out-of-pocket exposure, and a public option that forces the consolidated hospital systems to compete. The childcare answer is known: fund it the way we fund K-12, because cheap for parents, decent for workers, and profitable for owners will never all three hold at once.
None of this is secret. The squeeze is real, and the policies that would relieve it are sitting in plain sight, most of them already working somewhere. What is missing is not the diagnosis. It is the willingness to override the local vetoes that protect the homeowners who already won — and the columns that count only the families who did.