Brent Buchanan

Glad to be here.

Well, let's go back to President Trump's State of the Union, where he talked about wage growth.

That's a really important aspect of costs that nobody's talking about, which is that

if you have more money to spend and costs go up a little bit it doesn't impact you nearly as much and one of the hardest things about the joe biden presidency was the fact that wages were depressed while costs were skyrocketing so your ability to purchase was even made worse and harder than even slight increases to price right now so that's the number one thing is focusing on what are the two inputs of everybody's budget and that is what money do i have coming in

and what money is going out.

And so while you have small spikes on gas price from the Iran conflict, you actually have 64% of people who are saying that they're living comfortably or fine right now.

And so it doesn't necessarily match with the narrative of the doom scroller narrative mainstream media saying that everybody is struggling right now.

There are definitely people struggling, but it doesn't necessarily fit with the data we have in our polling and also the data that you see on wage growth right now.

That's a good question, and it's not one that we have asked historically.

We were really trying to dig into in our March national survey, what is the truth behind when people say affordability and cost of living?

You know, God has blessed my family, but I still notice when things are getting more expensive and we make different decisions as a family.

But we wanted to suss through what is the truth behind all of this, and that's why we asked the question in that way.

Are you living comfortably?

Are you doing okay and having to watch things?

Be careful.

Are you just getting by?

Are you struggling to make ends meet?

And we only had 15% of Americans say that they're struggling to make ends meet out of those response options.

Well, one of the largest things that we've seen, at least prior to the Iran conflict, come out is people are saying that it is the affordability of health insurance that's one of the largest drivers of

a concern that they have related to their own personal ability to afford their life.