02

The Cost of Existence

What life costs, and how it diverges from how it feels

Four readings of one squeeze: what a middle-class life claims of income today, how the big-ticket costs have outrun that income since 2000, how far real wages have fallen behind, and how much worse it all feels than the fundamentals alone predict.

Each carries its own confidence label; every line traces to an official series, and the math is one click away.

THE COST-TO-EXIST RATIO (CLAIMED SHARE) COMPONENTS ROBUST · ASSEMBLY PLAUSIBLE

The share of each income already spoken for before a single free choice — the same arithmetic at three incomes, recomputed live as you change the assumptions below. The lower household carries the larger share because health premiums, food, fuel, and the shelter floor are flat dollars, and flat dollars are regressive. Select a bracket to see its breakdown.

Breakdown — median household, $83,730: $56,811 claimed (67.9%)

Taxes$12,093ROBUST
Debt service$9,481PLAUSIBLE
Shelter$11,700ROBUST
Food (thrifty, 2+0)$7,484ROBUST
Fuel (live, $4.305/gal)$2,932PLAUSIBLE
Health premiums$6,850ROBUST
Retirement gap$6,271CONTESTED
Out-of-pocket health—DISABLED — NO VERIFIED MEDIAN
Rebuild the basket — every assumption is yours to change
Shelter level
Health plan tier
Filing status
Children — each adds USDA thrifty food and shifts the household-size adjustment
Retirement adequacy target — Social Security replaces 42.6%; you choose what "enough" means
Show the math
Formula
ClaimedShare = (Taxes + Obligations + Shelter + Food + Fuel + Health + RetirementGap) / Income
Spine
Built on the Fed's own framework: the Debt Service Ratio (11.323096% of disposable income, as of 2025-10-01) carries debt service; shelter enters separately at HUD Fair Market Rent so nothing double-counts. The Fed's broader Financial Obligations Ratio read 14.2% when it was discontinued (2023-07-01) — shown as anchor.
Conservative where it lowers the share
State/local taxes omitted and out-of-pocket health disabled pending a verified median — both genuinely make the share read LOW, the conservative direction. Refundable credits are the exception: omitting the EITC and Child Tax Credit would overstate tax and read HIGH, so they are modeled and netted, not omitted. At these incomes with no children the credits are zero; add children in the editor and the tax line falls (it can go negative).
Sources
childcare · credits · food · fuel · fuel_price · health · income · retirement · shelter · taxes · tdsp
THE WEDGE — COST-TO-EXIST, INDEXED SINCE 2000 CHART PLAUSIBLE · LINES ROBUST · COMPOSITE CONTESTED

The Cost-to-Exist ratio reads what life costs today; this reads the trajectory. Since ~2000 the big-ticket categories that define a middle-class life have risen far faster than the median income that pays for them — the sourced, honest version of the viral "$100k-in-1995" argument. Every line traces to an official series.

Since 2000, in nominal dollars: Housing (rent) ×2.28 ·Tuition & childcare ×2.66 ·Healthcare ×2.16 ·Food ×1.97 ·Energy ×2.24 ·New vehicles ×1.25 ·All-items CPI ×1.82 ·Median income ×1.99 Read at 2024 (the latest year median income is published). Each multiple is one official series rebased to 100 at 2000 — ROBUST, no basket weighting required.
100150200250100 = 20002000200520102015202020252013 income redesignTuition & childcare ×2.66Housing (rent) ×2.28Energy ×2.24Healthcare ×2.16Median income ×1.99Food ×1.97All-items CPI ×1.82New vehicles ×1.25
Hover or focus the chart for the exact index, the underlying level, the multiple vs 2000, and each line's source and as-of date.

CAVEAT Healthcare. CPI medical care is a per-UNIT price; it understates the TOTAL health burden, which also grew with utilization. The declared National Health Expenditures-per-capita line is the total-burden alternative.

REQUIRED CAVEAT New vehicles. CPI new vehicles is hedonically quality-adjusted and has risen far less than transaction (sticker) prices — so this line UNDER-states the wedge. The declared average-transaction-price line is the out-of-pocket counterpart; this line never renders without this note.

Rebase, toggle, and reweight — every assumption is yours
Base period — the one disclosed assumption (this is why the chart is PLAUSIBLE, the lines ROBUST)
Cadence — income stays annual either way (never interpolated)
Shelter — one line at a time, never summed
Lines on the chart
Shade the wedge — the gap between income and one category
Composite line (CONTESTED — disclosed weights)
THE COMPOSITE — ONE WEIGHTED NUMBER CONTESTED — THE WEIGHTING IS A JUDGMENT

×2.25 Weighted by the shares below, the price of the 2000 basket has risen ×2.25 by 2024, while median income rose ×1.99. On the 2000 median of $41,990, keeping pace would take an extra $10,586 a year — the composite wedge. Reweight and watch it move.

Default shares are seeded from the live Cost-to-Exist default basket (shelter, food, fuel→energy, health→medical dollar lines), with tuition seeded from the editor's center-based childcare cost and vehicles seeded as a small disclosed share (the basket carries no vehicle line). It is a companion to the transparent per-category lines above, never a replacement — the lead is the multiples, which need no weights at all.

Declared alternatives — the manual-feed lines that correct where official CPI under-states cost:
Screen-reader data table — every visible line's indexed value by year
Index (100 = 2000), annual headline values; nominal dollars.
YearAll-items CPIHousing (rent)Tuition & childcareHealthcareFoodEnergyNew vehiclesMedian income
2000100100100100100100100100
2001103104105105103104100101
20021041091121101059898101
200310711211911410711097103
200411011512811911112296106
200511311813612411414297110
200611712214412911615896115
200712012815313512116795120
200812513216114012819094120
200912513516914413015595119
201012713617714913117097117
201113113818415313619699119
2012133142192159139197101122
2013135146199163141196102128
2014137150205167145195102128
2015138156213171147163103135
2016139161219178148152103141
2017142168224182149164103146
2018146174229186151177102150
2019148180235191154173103164
2020150186240199159158103162
2021157190243201166191109169
2022170201250210182239121178
2023177217258211192227125192
2024182228266216197224125199
2025——————125—
Show the math
Formula
Indexᵢ(t) = 100 × Seriesᵢ(t) / Seriesᵢ(base)
Base period
Default 2000; selectable among 2000, 2008, 2013, 2019, 2020. The base is the chart's one disclosed assumption — why the chart is PLAUSIBLE while each line is ROBUST. The menu offers only years where every core line already exists, so no line is ever back-filled.
Confidence
Chart PLAUSIBLE (Sound, mechanical computation resting on one disclosed assumption — the base period.); each line ROBUST (Each line is a primary-official series, rebased mechanically.); composite CONTESTED (The basket weighting that collapses the lines into one number is a judgment.).
Disclosures
  • Lines are NOMINAL dollars — nominal income vs nominal prices. We do not deflate; deflating is what hides the wedge.
  • Canonical cadence is ANNUAL: monthly CPI components are resampled to calendar-year averages and joined on the year. Income is annual and is never interpolated.
  • Income is collected each March; the CPI components are annual averages — a timing mismatch, disclosed, not bridged.
  • CPI components are seasonally-adjusted (the smoothed line) except rent of primary residence (CUUR0000SEHA, NSA); NSA is offered as the fidelity option.
  • Series begin where their data begins (tuition 1978, Case-Shiller 1987); before that the line is blank, never back-filled. Default base 2000 keeps every core line present.
  • The 2013 CPS income-redesign break is marked on the income line and never silently bridged.
Income break
The Census redesigned the income questions in the 2014 CPS (2013 income year), raising measured median income by a level shift. The break is marked and never silently bridged; the ACS median (also Census) is the cross-check where it overlaps.
Sources
cpi · energy · food · income · medical · shelter_home · shelter_rent · tuition · vehicles · wages
THE CUMULATIVE REAL WAGE GAP PLAUSIBLE — BASE PERIOD IS YOURS
102.6 Real Wage Index as of 2026-04 — the median hour buys 2.6% more than at the base you chose. 100 = the base period.
Base period — the disclosed assumption (this is why it is PLAUSIBLE, not ROBUST)
Show the math
Formula
RealWageIndex(t) = (AHE(t)/CPI(t)) / (AHE(base)/CPI(base)) × 100
Splice discipline
Two wage series, shown separately and never spliced: all-employees AHE begins 2006-03; production-and-nonsupervisory AHE carries the history to 1964. They differ in level and composition.
Cousin on screen
S2, real wage growth (the flow, ROBUST), in the cousins row below.
Sources
cpi · wages_long · wages_modern
THE SENTIMENT GAP (THE VIBES GAP) PLAUSIBLE / CONTESTED — SPEC PUBLISHED IN FULL
-37.9 Michigan sentiment reads 49.8; unemployment, inflation, and real wage growth alone predict 87.7. The difference is how much worse it feels than the fundamentals in the model say it should — and the model deliberately omits the privatized life taxes measured above. A gap, not a point: 95% CI [-42.5, -33.4] (Newey-West HAC), with a typical scatter of ±11.61.
Show the math
Specification
OLS: sentiment ~ const + unemployment + cpi_yoy + real_wage_growth, monthly, full available joint sample; Newey-West (HAC, 12 lags) standard errors
Sample
1965-02-01 to 2026-04-01 (631 months)
R²
0.2769 — published, not hidden; a low R² means the fundamentals never explained the mood fully, which is itself the finding
Stationarity (ADF / KPSS)
cpi_yoy: non-stationary (both tests agree) (ADF p=0.0691, KPSS p=0.01) · real_wage_growth: inconclusive (the two tests disagree) (ADF p=0.0006, KPSS p=0.01) · sentiment: inconclusive (the two tests disagree) (ADF p=0.1449, KPSS p=0.0957) · unemployment: stationary (both tests agree) (ADF p=0.0213, KPSS p=0.0711)
Spurious-regression test (Engle-Granger)
Residual ADF p = 0.5491 — not clearly cointegrated at 5% — treat the gap as descriptive only. The test is published precisely because it does not flatter the model.
Coefficients (std. err.)
const: 107.1739 (5.4807) · cpi_yoy: -2.4403 (0.5521) · real_wage_growth: -0.745 (0.9739) · unemployment: -2.3268 (0.8969)
Wage series
Real wage growth uses production & nonsupervisory AHE (AHETPI, 1964+) so the sample reaches 1978; disclosed.
Cousin on screen
S1, the Misery Index (ROBUST, the blunt old version of the same instinct), in the cousins row below.
Sources
cpi · sentiment · unemployment · wages

ESTABLISHED COUSINS — OFFICIAL SERIES, SHOWN FOR ANCHOR

S13 · WORKERS' SLICE OF WHAT CORPORATIONS PRODUCE
Labor's share of corporate output (compensation / value added)
54.49

▼ −0.22 since last quarter

lower than ~100% of its last decade — near the bottom of its record — trending series sit near their own extreme most days; the state reads distance from typical, not rank

1947–2026
WATCH ROBUST z -1.65 DRS 95 AS OF 2026-01-01 DERIVED
In context — what this read at past stress points
Lehman, Sep 2008 60.40 · CALM
Q4-2018 selloff 57.42 · CALM
Curve inversion, Aug 2019 57.37 · CALM
COVID crash, Mar 2020 58.84 · CALM