Deer In Headlines
By Gery Deer

We hear it all the time. The stock market is up. The Dow set a record. Corporate earnings are strong. Investors are feeling confident. Therefore, we’re told, the economy is doing well. Maybe it is. But I have to wonder whether we’re checking the wrong end of the receipt.

Most people don’t experience the economy by watching a ticker crawl across the bottom of a television screen. They experience it at Kroger, Walmart, the gas station, the pharmacy and when the electric bill arrives. The economy becomes considerably less theoretical when you’re standing in the grocery aisle wondering whether you really need that package of hamburger this week.

That’s not to say the stock market doesn’t matter. It does. Retirement accounts, pensions and investments belonging to plenty of ordinary working people depend on healthy markets. Businesses rely on investment to expand, hire people and develop new products. A strong stock market can certainly be good news. But it doesn’t necessarily mean everybody is sharing in that good news.

So here’s a thought. What if we measured the health of the American economy from the other direction? Instead of concentrating so heavily on how investors and the largest corporations are doing, what if one of our most important measurements was how the lowest-income 30 percent of households were getting along?

Can they afford groceries? Can they pay the electric bill and the rent in the same week? Can they put gas in the car without moving money from somewhere else? If the transmission goes out, can they repair it without creating a financial crisis that follows them for six months?

Maybe we need something I’ll call the Kitchen Table Index. Nothing fancy. No complicated charts that require an economist to explain them. Just bread, milk, eggs, hamburger, coffee, cereal, toilet paper, laundry detergent, gasoline, utilities and housing. The boring stuff. The things nobody posts pictures of after buying, but everybody needs.

Imagine hearing on the evening news that the Kitchen Table Index had improved because the average household in the bottom third of the income scale had more money left after paying for basic necessities. Wouldn’t that tell us something useful about the economy?

In fact, people with the least disposable income may be some of our most sensitive economic instruments. Someone earning a comfortable six-figure salary may notice that groceries cost another $40 this week, but probably won’t change dinner plans because of it. For someone living paycheck to paycheck, that same $40 has to come from somewhere. Maybe it’s gasoline. Maybe it’s medicine. Maybe it’s the phone bill. Maybe something simply doesn’t get paid. Economic pressure shows up there quickly.

That doesn’t mean we should throw out the Dow, the S&P 500, unemployment numbers, gross domestic product or any of the other measurements economists use. An economy as enormous and complicated as ours can’t possibly be described by one number. The problem comes when one set of numbers says things are going wonderfully while millions of people look at their bank accounts and wonder who, exactly, is having this wonderful time.

Perhaps that’s part of why conversations about the economy become so frustrating. Two people can look at the same country and see entirely different realities. One sees investments growing and businesses reporting record earnings. The other sees a grocery receipt that used to be $125 creeping toward $175. Neither is necessarily imagining things.

We tend to measure prosperity from the top down, even though economic stress is usually experienced from the bottom up. Maybe that’s worth changing, or at least reconsidering.

The stock market can tell us what investors believe companies may be worth tomorrow. A grocery receipt tells us what it costs a family to live today. Both matter. Both are part of the same economy.

But if we really want to know how healthy that economy is, perhaps we should spend a little less time staring at Wall Street and occasionally look across the kitchen table. Maybe the question isn’t simply whether the economy is growing.

Maybe it’s who can actually feel it growing. Because prosperity that never reaches the grocery cart may look impressive on paper, but it probably feels pretty hollow at dinnertime.