US GDP Revised to 0.5% as War, Shutdown Weigh on Growth

Consumer sentiment has collapsed to the lowest level ever recorded, even as Washington tells Americans the economy is fundamentally sound. The University of Michigan’s April survey hit 47.6, a number lower than during the worst stretches of the 1970s and 1980s when inflation was in double digits and unemployment lines stretched around the block. Yet official statistics paint a different picture: unemployment below recent averages, median household income at record highs after inflation, and economic growth holding steady despite tariffs and foreign conflicts. The disconnect is no longer debatable. Americans are not imagining their pain.

A new budget proposal from the Trump White House deepens the sense that policymakers have simply stopped caring about the bodies piling up at home. The Department of Health and Human Services faces a $15 billion cut, a 12 percent reduction from current levels. This comes after last year’s “big, beautiful bill” already carved more than $1 trillion over the next decade from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by imposing work requirements that analysts say will strip health coverage from 15 million people. The message is unmistakable: in the world’s richest country, preventable death is not a priority.

The human cost is no longer abstract. Americans die from avoidable causes at nearly twice the rate of people in Spain, France, Japan, or Australia. Treatable conditions kill them because they cannot afford to see a doctor, run a diagnostic test, or fill a prescription. Out-of-pocket medical costs in the United States tower over every peer nation. Millions routinely skip care they know they need. Life expectancy, which barely budged for working-class Americans even before the pandemic, continues to reflect a society that treats sickness as a personal financial failure rather than a national emergency.

Childcare costs tell a similar story. American women sit out the labor force at rates far below other industrialized countries because raising children has become prohibitively expensive. The budget offers no serious relief here either. Instead, the White House proposes to hand record sums to the Pentagon while domestic programs that might keep citizens alive and families intact are squeezed. This is not fiscal discipline. It is a statement of values. Bombs and foreign bases come first. Sick factory workers and exhausted mothers come last.

Younger Americans understand this better than the experts quoting GDP charts. An informal survey of working-age adults revealed a consistent refrain: stop comparing today’s numbers to the 1970s or 1980s. Those generations may have faced higher inflation and weaker growth, but a single modest income could still buy a house, support children, and leave enough left over for a vacation. Today’s economy, by contrast, feels extractive. Wages that look healthy on paper are devoured by housing, insurance, education, and medical bills. The data say Americans have never been richer. The grocery store, the emergency room, and the real estate listings tell them they have never been more squeezed.

This is not a partisan observation. Previous administrations from both parties expanded the administrative state and outsourced the industrial base while promising that cheaper consumer goods would compensate for lost communities and stagnant wages. The result is visible in every county that once built things and now imports them. Deaths of despair, opioid overdoses, and the quiet erosion of life expectancy were warning signs long before the latest budget numbers arrived. Washington responded by arguing over abstract growth rates and defense appropriations.

The military increase comes as no surprise to those who have watched defense spending balloon for decades while domestic infrastructure crumbled and healthcare remained a luxury good. Americans are routinely told we must project strength abroad. The same voices rarely explain why that strength cannot extend to keeping our own citizens from dying of conditions that other nations treat as routine. The budget’s priorities reflect a ruling class more attuned to foreign capitals and contractor profits than to the realities inside American homes.

Economists will continue citing median income figures and unemployment rates. They will describe the consumer sentiment collapse as irrational. But sentiment is not irrational when people watch their neighbors die younger, their children priced out of family life, and their government respond by trimming the healthcare budget while expanding the military one. The numbers may look fine on a spreadsheet in the capital. In the rest of the country, the ledger shows a society that is getting sicker, poorer in real terms, and increasingly convinced that its leaders have chosen not to notice.

This reality cannot be papered over with press releases about record highs. Americans are not rejecting good economic data out of spite. They are measuring the economy by whether they can raise a family, stay healthy, and grow old without bankrupting themselves. By that measure, the world’s richest nation is failing its own people, and the latest budget proposal doubles down on that failure.