White to move and mate in two #681 - Engine of Inequality

White to move and mate in two. The chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is customary for advanced players to wait till midnight ET before posting the full solution. Before then, they provide some stats about the solution (e.g., the number of distinct checkmate moves), help guide others, and sometimes post hints. But, there are no hard-and-fast rules, feel free to post comments as you please.

The FED and the Future of Wealth in America

How Unequal Are We?
…
  What of the vaunted American middle class? Using the “Gini coefficient” — an established equality measure — the middle class disappears into a void left by far more wealth at the top and far less sliding down to the bottom. Simply put, a Gini index of zero means that everyone earns or owns the same amount of income or wealth — perfect equality; a Gini of one means that one person earns or owns it all. The Gini coefficient thus helps to tell us if America’s long-cherished image as a nation of middle-class households is still true. Sadly, it isn’t.²⁰
  The Gini coefficient and survey data used by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show that the middle class took home a smaller slice of the income pie — i.e., it was “hollowed out” — by large income gains at the very top of the income distribution and by the descent of many once middle-class earners into lower-income groups from 1979 to 2016.²¹ In 1970, middle-class families earned 62 percent of national income; in 2019, this was 43 percent.²² Over the same period, the upper-income share grew from 29 percent to 48 percent,23 and lower-income share fell from 10 percent to 9 percent.²⁴
  The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 2020 looked at all of the most recent studies of the US middle class,²⁵ comparing the 2018 middle class to the far more vibrant one in the US of 1980 before inequality began to accelerate. Looking at real median household income for working-age adults and recalculating it to reflect higher consumption costs, this study corrects for problems such as US demographic shifts and oversimplified income measures that do not reflect recent hikes in the cost of living. It finds “fairly flat” real income growth for the working-age middle class as a whole, but much of this is due to the growth of two-income households and all of it is eviscerated when the cost of health care and housing are taken into account. These costs increased more than nominal middle-class income from 1980 to 2018, with the cost of education alone over this period increasing an astonishing 600 percent.
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--Karen Petrou, Engine of Inequality

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Solution