The Myth We Tell Ourselves

America tells itself a story about scarcity. We don't have enough housing for everyone. Healthcare is too expensive to provide universally. Education costs more than we can afford. Good food, safe neighborhoods, stable work—all scarce resources in a nation of limited means.

This story is a lie.

We have enough. We've always had enough. The scarcity is manufactured.

The question isn't whether America has sufficient resources for everyone to live abundantly. The question is why those resources are concentrated in so few hands that millions go without while billions sit unused, hoarded at the top like grain rotting in Pharaoh's silos while people starve outside.

This is the story of American scarcity. Not a story of insufficient resources. A story of gluttony so extreme it creates artificial scarcity for everyone else.

What Does "Abundance" Actually Cost?

Before we can talk about scarcity, we need to define abundance. Not luxury. Not excess. Abundance—the resources required for a household to live without precarity, with dignity, health, and opportunity.

What does that actually cost in America today?

We can measure it. Housing that's safe, stable, and appropriately sized. Food that's nutritious and sufficient. Healthcare that's accessible when needed. Transportation that's reliable. Utilities that don't get shut off. Education that opens doors. Childcare that allows parents to work. Emergency savings so a broken-down car doesn't become a financial catastrophe.

The research is clear: For a family of four in the United States in 2023, an abundant life—not lavish, not even comfortable by upper-middle-class standards, but genuinely secure—requires approximately $110,000 per year in total resource value.

And here's what makes this threshold more than theoretical: happiness research validates it.

In 2010, Nobel Prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published groundbreaking research showing that emotional well-being—day-to-day happiness—increases with income but plateaus at approximately $75,000 per year. Beyond that threshold, additional money didn't reduce emotional pain or increase happiness. It improved people's abstract evaluation of their lives ("I'm successful"), but it didn't make their days better.

Adjusted for inflation, that 2010 threshold translates to approximately $108,000 in 2024 dollars—remarkably close to our abundance framework.

When conflicting research emerged in 2021, Kahneman collaborated with researcher Matthew Killingsworth in what they called an "adversarial collaboration" to resolve the contradiction. Their 2023 reconciliation study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed something crucial: "For the unhappiest 15% of people—those dealing with real hardship—emotional well-being plateaus at around $100,000 per year." Beyond that income, more money doesn't help because their problems aren't resource problems anymore. Heartbreak, bereavement, clinical depression—these don't yield to higher incomes once basic security is achieved.

The researchers' conclusion: "This income threshold may represent the point beyond which the miseries that remain are not alleviated by high income."

Once you have enough resources to meet your needs and achieve basic security, more money stops solving problems. The threshold validated independently by happiness economics sits right around $100,000 to $110,000.

The metric here is resource value, which is the combination of what you can afford to spend annually plus the cushion of assets (home equity, savings, vehicles) that keep you stable when life happens.

Optimally, the threshold is $110,000. Below it, you're managing scarcity. Above it, you have abundance.

Now let's look at who has it.

The Scarcity Pattern

Seven income categories, from the poorest 20% of American households to the wealthiest 1%. For each category, we measured the total resource value they actually possess—not what they earn, but what they have access to when accounting for both annual expenditures and asset cushions.

The Bottom 60%: Manufactured Scarcity

Lowest 20% (households earning less than $33,000):
Resource value = $43,000
Gap to abundance = $67,000

They possess 39% of what they need. The scarcity gap is larger than what they have. For renters in this income bracket (under $30,000), after paying housing costs, they have only $250 per month left for all other necessities—food, healthcare, transportation, utilities, everything (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies 2025). Try living on $250/month. That's the manufactured scarcity.

Second 20% ($33,000 – $62,000):
Resource value = $68,000
Gap to abundance = $42,000

They possess 62% of what they need. Getting closer, but still in structural scarcity.

Third 20% ($62,000 – $101,000):
Resource value = $100,000
Gap to abundance = $10,000

They possess 91% of what they need. So close you can see it—just $10,000 short of security. One moderate emergency away from crisis. One job loss from precarity.

These three quintiles represent 60% of American households. Together, they contain approximately 176 million people. Every single one of them lives below the abundance threshold.

The Top 40%: From Comfort to Gluttony

Fourth 20% ($101,000 – $165,000):
Resource value = $143,000
Excess beyond abundance = $33,000

The first group to cross the abundance threshold. They have everything needed for abundance, plus a cushion.

Highest 20% ($165,000 – $300,000):
Resource value = $250,000
Excess beyond abundance = $140,000

They possess more than twice what's needed for an abundant life.

Top 10% ($300,000 – $659,000):
Resource value = $400,000
Excess beyond abundance = $290,000

Nearly four times the abundance threshold.

Top 1% (>$660,000):
Resource value = $1,500,000
Excess beyond abundance = $1,390,000

Fourteen times the abundance threshold.

The Pattern: Scarcity is Gluttony

The scarcity experienced by 176 million Americans is created by the excess hoarded at the top.

When the top 1% possesses resources valued at $1.5 million per household—$1.39 million more than needed for abundance—while the bottom 20% struggles with $43,000 (missing $67,000 of what they need), we're not looking at a "wealth gap." We're looking at resource hoarding so extreme it manufactures scarcity for everyone else.

The same pattern repeats across every category of need:

Housing: 15.6 million vacant housing units exist alongside 650,000 homeless Americans—24 empty homes per homeless person. The bottom income quintile has a 47.1% homeownership rate while the top quintile has 81% (Census Bureau ACS, Minneapolis Fed 2023). Half of all renters (22.6 million) are "cost-burdened," spending over 30% of income on housing (Census Bureau, HUD, Harvard Joint Center 2024-2025).

Food: America produces 3,800-4,000 calories per person daily—nearly twice what's needed—then wastes 30-40% (106+ million tons annually) while 44 million Americans experience food insecurity (USDA, EPA 2022).

Wealth: The top 1% holds 30.5% of all U.S. wealth while the bottom 50% holds 2.5%. At the 10th percentile, median net worth is literally $1 (Federal Reserve 2022-2024).

Healthcare: $4.9 trillion annual spending, 1.1 million physicians, and 920,000 hospital beds, yet 27.6 million are uninsured and 100 million carrying medical debt (AHA, Census, KFF/Peterson 2023-2024).

The universal pattern:

1. Abundant capacity exists (more than enough for everyone)
2. Concentrated at the top (hoarded beyond functional use)
3. Scarcity at the bottom (millions lack access despite abundance)

The gap is manufactured scarcity through resource hoarding.

What Gluttony Actually Means

Let's be precise about language. Gluttony isn't eating well. It isn't enjoying comfort. It isn't even being wealthy. Gluttony is consuming or hoarding far beyond need while others go without.

When you possess $1.5 million in resource value and the threshold for an abundant life is $110,000, you're not "successful." You're hoarding $1.39 million beyond any functional use while 176 million people lack the resources to reach that threshold.

That's gluttony.

Not the personal moral failing kind, though there's plenty of that. The structural kind—baked into systems that reward resource extraction and accumulation without limit, regardless of need, regardless of consequence, regardless of the scarcity it creates for everyone else.

The Third 20% of households earning between $62,000 and $101,000 possess $100,000 in resource value but are $10,000 short of abundance. These households live one medical emergency, one job loss, or one car breakdown away from financial insecurity.

The arithmetic is simple: Redistributing just one-seventh of the top 1%'s excess resources ($200,000 per household) would close that $10,000 gap for the entire Third 20% (27 million households or 67 million people). The top 1% would still possess $1.3 million per household—nearly twelve times the abundance threshold.

The Abundant Life Denied

Let's talk about what that $10,000 gap actually means for the Third 20%.

You're a family of four with household income of around $80,000. You're doing everything "right"—working full-time, paying bills, saving what you can. You're not poor by official standards. You're "middle class." According to BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey data (2024), the average American household spends $78,535 annually on housing (33.4%), transportation (17%), food (12.9%), insurance & retirement (12.9%), and healthcare (7.9%). You're managing all of that. Barely.

But you're $10,000 short of abundance. And that gap is everything.

It's the difference between fixing the car when it breaks down and hoping it lasts another month. Between taking your kid to the dentist when they complain about tooth pain and waiting to see if it gets worse. Between having three months of emergency savings and living paycheck to paycheck. Between "we can handle this" and "one more thing and we're underwater."

You're one moderate crisis away from precarity at all times.

The bottom 60% of American household earners live in this space. Below abundance. Managing scarcity. Making impossible choices between rent and healthcare, food and utilities, stability and survival. And we're told this is normal. This is how it must be. There isn't enough to go around.

Yet there is enough. The data proves it.

The Moral Clarity

Here's where we need moral clarity, not economic jargon.

Scarcity is gluttony.

When 176 million Americans live below the abundance threshold while the top 1% hoards resources valued at fourteen times that threshold, the scarcity isn't natural. It's manufactured by excess.

This isn't a "both sides" issue. This isn't a matter of different economic philosophies or political preferences. This is a matter of observable reality:

We have enough housing. It's vacant.
We have enough food. We waste it.
We have enough wealth. It's hoarded.
We have enough resources for everyone to live abundantly. They're just concentrated in so few hands that millions go without.

The bottom 60% of household earners live in financial precarity because American systems reward infinite accumulation at the top while calling poverty at the bottom a "personal responsibility" problem. This isn't economics. This is theft dressed up as merit.

The Path Forward: Universal Abundance Income

There has been much discussion about establishing Universal Basic Income to offset the loss of income experienced by lower income households. This idea is wholly inadequate to alleviate the financial precarity experienced by the bottom 60% of household earners in America. We need to establish Universal Abundance Income.

We can easily afford it by imposing an excess resource tax of 30% on the top 1% of U.S. households, 20% on the top 10% of U.S. households (net of the top 1%), and 15% on the top 20% of U.S. households (net of the top 10%). This tax will generate $6.3 trillion annually in Universal Abundance Income for the bottom 60% of U.S. households—completely eliminating financial precarity in America.

Yes, this is a radical idea. But we are experiencing a housing affordability crisis causing food insecurity in the richest country on Earth. We can fix this. Universal Abundance Income is the path forward.