Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari wants to jack up your borrowing costs even higher — and his reasoning boils down to this: corporate profits are booming, so you must have it too good.

Kashkari was one of three dissenters at last week's Federal Open Market Committee meeting who voted for a quarter-point rate hike. The other nine members held the line, keeping the benchmark rate at 3.5%-3.75%. But Kashkari isn't backing down, telling CNBC that current monetary policy is not "particularly restrictive" — and he's got the evidence to prove it, straight from Wall Street's quarterly reports.

"Corporate earnings are through the roof. They're doing great. The consumer is hanging in there. The labor market is hanging in there," Kashkari said from the Aspen Ideas Festival. "I look at this constellation and I say, what evidence do I have that monetary policy is particularly restrictive right now?"

There it is. The Fed looks at multinationals posting record profits and concludes the American worker isn't squeezed hard enough. Never mind that those same supply shocks Kashkari acknowledges are "pressuring consumers" — you know, the grocery bills and gas prices that eat into every paycheck — somehow don't register as evidence that Main Street is already hurting. Corporate earnings are the metric. Your kitchen-table math doesn't count.

Kashkari insists he's not "calling for a dramatic increase" — just "slowly moving up" in small steps to avoid having to raise rates aggressively later. "I would rather get going now in small steps than wait till later, then we have a really entrenched inflation problem," he said. Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, another dissenter, backed the same line, saying the Fed must "act to speed the return of PCE inflation to our 2 percent objective" and that "the longer that high inflation persists, the more challenging and costly it can be to bring it back down."

Not everyone at the Fed agrees. Philadelphia Fed President Anna Paulson said holding rates was "not a close call" for her, arguing current policy is already "mildly restrictive." New York Fed Chair John Williams has also said he expects inflation to ease at current rates. CNBC noted that the three dissenting votes were the first under Chairman Kevin Warsh's tenure — and Kashkari said Warsh didn't pressure him, telling him to "do what you think is the right thing to do for the economy."

International Business Times framed the split as a straightforward policy disagreement among data-driven officials. CNBC emphasized the "gradual approach" and the data-dependency of future moves. What neither outlet asked: who actually benefits when the Fed raises rates? Higher borrowing costs crush small businesses seeking loans, pinche homebuyers out of the market, and inflate the debt burden on every working American carrying a balance. Meanwhile, banks and lenders collect wider spreads. The constellation Kashkari sees — corporate earnings "through the roof" — isn't a bug. It's the feature.

The Fed has one lever, and it keeps pulling it the same way. The question nobody in Aspen is asking is whether that lever was ever designed to help the people who actually work for a living.