Maybe I just have a simplistic view of these things, but I don't see how given sufficient data across the economy you couldn't tease out whether people were ove

Maybe I just have a simplistic view of these things, but I don't see how given sufficient data across the economy you couldn't tease out whether people were overspending or truly living at the limit. After all, just "living paycheck to paycheck" says nothing about your income per-se. You could make several millions/year and struggle to pay your NYC penthouse mortgage and the loan on your Ferrari. But the image that's invoked when you read that phrase is not someone who's absurdly rich and living beyond his means, but someone who's poor and struggling to make rent on their apartment or paying for their car. In aggregate, if all those people would make $500 less a month you'd expect a significant spike in foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies etc. It would look much like the 2007-2009 recession. Or, if they truly weren't living beyond their means and were all given a $500 lottery ticket how that money gets spent says a lot about their situation. Does such an injection of cash into the economy e.g. reduce the foreclosure ratio? That would indicate that people weren't truly living beyond their means. Or does it only show an increase in consumer spending without any meaningful change in such numbers? Then it's more likely that those people were just bad financial planners, or just haven't thought to save any of their income.