Maybe 2026 is the Right Time to Restructure U.S. Economic Reporting to Reflect our Dual Economy

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc^®.

In the past few decades, there has been a building discussion by affected parties – the bottom 90% of the consumers, entrepreneurs, small and mid-size businesses and communities continually devastated by unexpected gyrations created by the 10% – about the “K-shaped economy.” The momentum is steadily building for either a correction to this version of capitalism to make it more fair and growing for a larger part of the economy like during the post-WWII boom, with metrics/statistics,  attention/reporting to track and report that change to citizens who need that information to affect change that positively impacts their future.

Have you ever watched a business show or some network news “economic expert” explain the state of the U.S. economy, scratched your head and asked yourself, “What world are these guys living in?” You hear things like, “good news for XYZ company, 10,000 workers will be laid off.” Or, “the federal reserve interest rate dropped .25%, meaning credit card interest rates, mortgage rates, borrowing rates are headed downward for consumers,” when rarely do those things happen to low and middle class personal and small business borrowers (who end up using personal business cards as their business line of credit since banks rarely lend unless real estate is involved). The average consumer credit card interest rate between 1995 and 2025 fell only two years below 15% when many of those years the Federal Reserve interest rate was near 0.0% for premium borrowers.

Or you might hear, “good news, inflation last month dropped by .5%, signaling consumers could breath a little easier,” when most of us nearly choke when we see prices at the grocery store, fill our gas tank or opened our monthly telephone or utility bills. The product prices the Department of Labor statistics choses to average can be “gamed” and it must be remembered that it represents the “rate of inflation,” not the “level of inflation,” which rarely goes down for consumers once a high is reached.

There is a reason the vast majority of Americans feel their issues haven’t been addressed for a long time. Rosy economic statistics for a few and grim economic statistics being experienced by the many have been, for decades, lumped together with the cheery numbers prevailing. Individuals keeping silent, thinking they are the only ones experiencing tough economics and unjustly blaming themselves for the harsh times inflicted upon them. For example, when looking at the rise in personal income for the U.S. over a period of time, understand that includes the billionaires and highly paid CEOs as well as the most poor. It is like “teachers grading tests based on the curve,” always thrown off by that one smart guy/girl who skews the curve towards him/her and those below score worse grades than they would have. Personal Income Growth at the low end looks better it they should because adding the higher and highest income individuals into the same formula gives the illusion that all “boats are rising” when most are still trapped in the tidal mud.

Another example is cheering on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the stock market when it goes up and fretting when it goes down. First of all, the Down Jones Industrial Average is a derivative basket of 30 premium stocks that are bet with and against like a hedge fund. Chances are very few 401Ks include them in their portfolio – except through exchange traded funds (“ETFs”) – and most people wouldn’t know if they were. But if some in the basket individually decline too much that they are dragging the fund down, they are replaced and the Dow continues its climb upward. Furthermore, in 2025 62% of Americans had  some ownership of stock, yet “The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks even with market participation at a record high. The bottom 50% of Americans held just 1% of all stocks as of the third quarter of 2023” according to Business Insider. The top has enough financial power to drive stock prices up when it serves them, and drive stock prices down – betting on the decline by causing it – unbeknownst to the small, disengaged investor. They have enough of the collective wealth to create illusionary trends to fuel their market profits even more by pushing the economy in the direction that benefits them…until it doesn’t and they move on to something else.

Most of the neutral economists of the past have been pushed aside by bank and corporate economists whose income is based on their client’s success, so telling a story supportive to their client’s goals pays off for them. This results is a “sugar coating “ of bad news that normally would spur a government, pushed by constituents, to act, and good news for wealthy investors that is portrayed by worthy of celebration by all.

Wealth distribution has continued to be an issue as wages for most have held steady or declined in real value for the vast majority of American for the past 40 years, while prices on everything continued climb and more products and services were privatized from public management. The result:

• In 2023, 97.5% of all net worth —totaling $139.4 trillion — was owned by the 50% of Americans with above-average net worth. The remaining 167 million Americans owned about 2.6% — or $3.6 trillion.
• As of 2023, the top 1% of American households owned 30.0% of net worth, or 30 cents of every dollar. This has risen from 22.8% in 1990 and 28.4% at the start of the 2008 recession, but is lower than a 2021 peak of 30.9%.
• The total net worth of the top 1% in 2023 was $43.0 trillion.

USA Facts

By 2025, according to Abigil Tierney of Statista,

• In the first quarter of 2025, almost two-thirds percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth.
• Income inequality in the U.S. – Despite the idea that the United States is a country where hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps will inevitably lead to success, this is often not the case. In 2023, 7.4 percent of U.S. households had an annual income under 15,000 U.S. dollars. With such a small percentage of people in the United States owning such a vast majority of the country’s wealth, the gap between the rich and poor in America remains stark.
• The top one percent – The United States was the country with the most billionaires in the world in 2025. Elon Musk, with a net worth of 342 billion U.S. dollars, was among the richest people in the United States in 2025. Over the past 50 years, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has exploded, causing the gap between rich and poor to grow, with some economists theorizing that this gap is the largest it has been since right before the Great Depression.

And, when the media and self-interested economists report the “Average Net Worth” of someone in their 50’s as $1,369,809 (Average includes the billionaires to the poorest) and the Median Net Worth is $192,964, (value separating the higher half from the lower half of a date sample), it gives policymakers cover while citizens try to figure out where they stand and why it doesn’t feel closer to the average net worth.

So why have we been content with economic reporting favoring the status quo for the top 10% of Americans? For most, we are kept from the true distribution for fear that the vast Americans will no longer cheer Wall Street on. If they see nothing in it for themselves and, worse yet, see a “zero sum outcome” whereby celebrating Wall Street bullishness means cheering those who are becoming billionaires by cutting wages for workers, cutting benefits, moving factories to lower wage labor markets or importing labor that will work for half of what Americans can, laying workers off, etc., there may be a significant blowback.

Everyone is feeling, and economists are recognizing, U.S. capitalism has reached a dangerous, but inevitable, milestone, currently referring to the phenomena as the “K-Shape Economy.” “In a K-shaped recovery, different parts of the economy move in opposite directions at the same time. One segment—the upper arm of the K—experiences an increase in wealth due to rising asset values or incomes. The lower arm faces increasing financial strain due to declining purchasing power along with stagnating or decreasing wages.”

K is for economic inequality.
© Miramiska/stock.adobe.com, © Lustre Art Group/stock.adobe.com; Photo illustration Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc

In a USA Today article, “The U.S. economy remains resilient but rests on three narrow pillars of growth: affluent consumers, an AI-driven investment surge, and asset price appreciation,” wrote EY-Parthenon Chief Economist Gregory Daco in a recent research note. “These interconnected supports are both a blessing and a vulnerability — capable of fueling either a virtuous or a vicious cycle. As tariffs and tighter immigration policies continue to weigh on employment and demand, and inflation reaccelerates, we expect momentum to fade heading into 2026.”

Not only is a very small percentage of the U.S. population benefiting from most of the economic activity and growth, any slip-ups in those who facilitated their speculation by clearing out regulations or ignoring regulations put in place after previous economic upheavals they created but could not control without shifting the losses to the taxpayers side of the balance sheet – in other words, privatizing profits while nationalizing losses can be catastrophic and lingering, such as after the Crash of 1929, the Crash of 2008 and all the upheavals in between.

Non-bank economists have been sounding the alarm and offering tools and metrics to properly evaluate the economy, considering its bifurcation, for decades. For example, the Job Quality Indices have been developed by many organizations, usually using 1990 as the baseline. It tracks several factors” “The Private Sector Job Quality Index assesses job quality in the United States by measuring desirable higher-wage/higher-hour jobs versus lower-wage/lower-hour jobs. The JQI results also may serve as a proxy for the overall health of the U.S. jobs market, since the index enables month-by-month tracking of the direction and degree of change in high-to-low job composition.” “By tracking this information, policymakers and financial market participants can be more fully informed of past developments, current trends, and likely future developments in the absence of policy intervention. Economists and international organizations have in recent years developed other, complementary conceptions of job quality such as those addressing the emotional satisfaction employees derive from their jobs.”

The 90% are only consumers to the 10%, and only serve that purpose until they can’t, then they are free-loaders and beggars – a drag on the system due to their own laziness and lack of ambition. We need a study into how prevalent Americans are pushed from whatever status they gained for themselves to the other side of the track, from which it is very hard to return. Once down, the rules make it hard to return. To minimize the urge to force your way back, the government, politicians and the media have been busy programming us to believe anyone can be a billionaire, a high-paid sports hero, or a talented and wealthy musician. If you can’t make it, it is only your fault and you have no place or purpose in such a vibrant America – perhaps one cause of a highly medicated nation

This is why crazy things get misreported, such as “the bottom 90% is has been irresponsibly spending so programs needed to help soften the impact of stagnant and declining wages even a little need to be cut.” Although $37.8 trillion is listed as “national (public) debt” in 2025 according to the Pew Research Center, “These phases [(of national debt growth] have corresponded with periods when the federal government ran large deficits: the Reagan-Bush years of the 1980s and early 1990s; the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession; and the COVID-19 pandemic, when federal debt spiked to an all-time high of 132.8% of GDP [from 55.1% in 2001] in the second quarter of 2020, according to our analysis. From 2021 to 2024 there was a 21% decline in the national debt, but it is expected to rise again. The national debt was not caused by the American vast majority, it was caused by the 3-5% and their money that influenced lawmakers who could have prevented this, AND most of whom remain wealthy as a result.”

As American workers are becoming more aware of their plight, thanks to other responsible citizens helping them to understand in technical terms what they are experiencing daily, we can only hope that they will press their elected officials to reverse this dangerous course and represent them for a few decades. Heaven knows, the 10% have had a wonderful ride to this point. Let’s hope they haven’t run out the clock for the rest of us.