The BLS maintains a model of “ordinary expenses”, which includes every category of expenditure that most American households spend money on. It isn’t based on necessity i.e. transportation is an “ordinary” expense and so buying an expensive BMW is considered “ordinary” under this model. The category of ordinary expenses is expansive.
The median US household has >$1,000 of income left over every month after all ordinary expenses per BLS. This has been the case for a long time. You can’t be living paycheck to paycheck in the sense of “having no money” if you can spend on luxury items in “necessary” categories and still have considerably money left over at the end of the month in the median case. That is the American reality.
Americans are astonishingly wealthy and they don’t even realize it.
I couldn't find any publications when searching for "bls ordinary expenses" and google's AI says you probably meant "Consumer Expenditure Surveys". However after looking at some of the data, I'm not sure it's as rosy as you make it out to be. For instance if you look at consumer expenditures by income[1], you see that the average across all consumer units is $87.9k of post-tax income against $77.3k of "average annual expenditures". That sounds okay until you look at some of the lower income groups. The $50k-69k group has $56.5k of post-tax income against $59.5k of expenses, which implies they're getting into debt to finance their lifestyle. That's true for every income group under $69k.
