A record 25.2 million Americans under 35 lived with their parents last year. Seven in ten of them have a job. The uncomfortable truth this generation keeps being told to solve with more effort is, by the numbers, not a character problem at all. It is a housing shortage, a broken entry-level job market, and…
Raising one child to adulthood in America now costs roughly $300,000. Childcare alone exceeds public college tuition in 28 states. And for the first time in the eleven-year history of the American Family Survey, finances have become the single most common reason Americans give for having fewer children than they actually want, cited twice as…
The White House points to a cooling inflation rate and calls it "big progress on prices." A mother filling a cart at the grocery store looks at a receipt nearly $30 higher than it would have been five years ago and calls it something else entirely. Both of them are looking at real numbers. They…
46% of Americans say they would choose a product labeled "Made in America" over an imported alternative. Only 20% say they are actually willing to pay significantly more to do it. That gap, between what Americans say they value and what they are prepared to spend defending it, is the real story behind a decade…
A house, two cars, a couple of kids, a retirement account that actually grows, and enough left over for a vacation once a year. That is roughly what "the American Dream" has meant for most of the past century. This year, this magazine decided to actually price it out, region by region, category by category,…
