DETROIT — It is the untold story of how inflation affects America’s households: credit card debt. 

When hikes in basic food, clothing, energy, utility, and insurance costs started to hit families three years ago, many families who lived paycheck to paycheck across the United States had to make a decision: “Go without” or go into debt to take care of their basic needs.

To put this in perspective: A whopping 65% of respondents indicated that they live paycheck to paycheck, according to a recent “Your Money International Financial Security Survey” by CNBC and SurveyMonkey, which polled 498 U.S. adults. 

That 65% could include your neighbor, your family member, your child’s soccer coach, or you.

It is not even a debt of frivolity. It is a debt born of necessity, and it is only going to get worse.

Last Tuesday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said that U.S. residents as a whole owe $1.14 trillion on their credit cards, with the average balance being over $6,000. That’s not all. With more people depending on credit cards to purchase their food, pay their utility bills, fill up at the gas pump, and pay their skyrocketing home and care insurance premiums, delinquencies are up, too, jumping 7% in the second quarter. And car loan delinquencies are at the highest number in 14 years.

Our country’s growing debt problem spares no one. Young people, married people, single people, and our growing retired population are all struggling to make ends meet, falling deeper into debt and finding no way out. 

All this is happening while current absentee President Joe Biden is snoozing at the beach and Vice President Kamala Harris pretends she had no hand in supporting or promoting Bidenomics while the national press are unwilling to call Harris out on it.

Two days after Harris was here with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), highlighting her ties with labor unions at the Local 900 union hall in Motor City with United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, the Stellantis company, which makes Jeeps, announced it was set to lay off just under 2,500 workers this year at the Ram Classic factory just outside the city. The layoffs are set to start at the beginning of October. 

Last year, the UAW, led by Fain, conducted a strike against the Big Three automakers. At the end of the strike, Ford and Stellantis said they had a positive outlook about their coming earnings. But for Stellantis, that has not been the case. During its 2024 first-half earnings call with CEO Carlos Tavares, the Jeep and Dodge automaker reported bleak sales, which led to the workforce downsizing to stabilize their investors.

Additionally, the Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, has been on pause since the first week of July, with expectations that production will be back up on Monday.

If you are a member of the UAW and live paycheck to paycheck, none of this is good news — especially if you had to run up credit card debt to pay for your basic bills or bought a home or a car in the past three years with high interest rates. Odds are, there is a considerable number of people who have a five-year-old car worth half or less than what they financed it for, making them even further upside-down in their financial stability.

It is a no-way-out situation, which is why, here in Michigan, bankruptcy filings rose by 12 percentage points for the year, according to court data.

Our economic problems in this country are rarely addressed in a meaningful way. When inflation first started to climb, Biden called it transitory. When it stuck around for a while, Biden said, “The plan is working.” When the prices remained high, he said it was “the world’s best economy.” 

Slate wrote breezy stories, including one titled “The real reason no one is giving Biden credit for how good the economy is right now,” and CNN had an article titled “Why Biden’s strong economy feels so bad to most Americans.”

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All the while, the public kept telling them it wasn’t good. And the debt kept rising. Now we have Harris, who started running for the presidency in July and still has not one economic policy page on her website, telling voters she will bring the economy back.

The question is: What has she been doing the past four years while the financial pressures have crushed Middle Americans? The other question is: Will anyone in my profession ask her?