“People at the top are doing fine, people in the middle and lower income brackets are struggling a bit, to say the least.”
Donald Trump’s allies this week hyped up newly released data showing that the US economy grew by more than 4% in the third quarter of 2025, but economists and journalists who dove into the report’s finer details found some troubling signs.
Ron Insana, a finance reporter and a former hedge fund manager, told MS Now‘s Stephanie Ruhle on Tuesday night that there is a “split economy” in which growth is being driven primarily by spending from the top 20% of income earners, whom he noted accounted for 63% of all spending in the economy.
On the other side, Insana pointed to retail sales data that painted a very different picture for those on the lower end of the income scale. “When you look at lower income individuals, nearly half of them are using ‘buy-now-pay-later’ for their holiday shopping,” he said. “So we have this real split… People at the top are doing fine, people in the middle and lower income brackets are struggling a bit, to say the least.”
People will tell you they hate the system. But any attempted reform is shot down as “too extreme” and “bad for the economy”
Pretty sure those are different sets of people. Like, mutually exclusive sets.
Unfortunately, we saw during the health care debate that they are not. You regularly had polls showing majority public discontent with the status quo, only to see every reform policy’s approval collapse after sustained negative media and marketing.