Affordability is closer than you think it is…Part 1

Jun 5

Probably the biggest concern I’ve heard from voters over the past few months is with affordability. The financial capacity to actually live and survive. It’s become a real problem for a majority of us, which is an alarming statement to make when we’re constantly told America is the richest country in the world. Standing in the grocery store checkout lane and deciding what to put back so you can afford heat, or cutting back to one meal a day so you can afford rent isn’t the most reassuring position to have, especially while staring down the barrel of rising gasoline prices. It really goes without saying that cost of fuel going up will only continue to make things worse. So how rough is it really for Americans? And how do we go about fixing this broken system?

According to studies conducted by Brookings Institute, a tax payer funded and non partisan think tank in Washington DC, millions of people across this country are straining to pay for basic necessities on their current income. Genuinely struggling to make ends meet is a reality for almost half the country.

45.5% of households didn’t earn enough to make ends meet in 2024.
In almost every year since 2014, over 40% of U.S. families struggled to cover basic necessities.
The number of households making ends meet severely dropped by 10% following the COVID pandemic.
55% of households of color could not afford sustainability in 2024.

This isn’t restricted to any one area of the country, nor is it solely a problem of race, although minorities and people of color distinctly fall further short than racial majority citizens. This is clearly a nationwide problem and needs nationwide reforms to fix it, but the solution is surprisingly closer than you think.

Almost 38 million households could make ends meet if wages were increased by $10 an hour, and an additional 10 million households could also make ends meet if monthly costs decreased by just $500.

Suddenly when we see it in front of us, it doesn’t feel like such an insurmountable problem. There are genuine ways to go about fixing all of this and they are well within our reach.

Raising the minimum wage. We currently have a federal minimum wage that does nothing for the American people. At $7.25 an hour, it’s irrelevant and useless to our current society. It hasn’t been raised since July 2009. I’ve set a goal wage of $22 an hour as my target for this specific issue, and we should go about a graduated raising of the minimum wage; $7.25/hr to $12/hr, $12/hr to $17/hr, and then $17/hr to $22/hr. Incremental increases like this would mitigate economic sticker shock for companies as they step up to take care of their workers. We need to also have a mandatory inflation adjustment review in place to reassess the relevance and effectiveness of the current minimum wage versus the actual cost of living and raise it when necessary to stay current and useful for our citizens.

I will also take pause here to INSIST we finally set legislation in place for equal pay for women and minorities. Equal work should mean equal pay, and it's well past the time when this should have been made the mandatory standard.

Lowering the cost of living. We can go about this by two immediate ways. The tax structure currently favoring the super wealthy needs to be changed. Middle class families need tax cuts, meanwhile the 1% can easily sustain paying a much higher rate. The country is strongest when our middle class is strong, and the tax structure needs to go back to one closer resembling the Eisenhower era, when our middle class thrived. At the same time, our healthcare system needs to be restructured completely. We begin by removing for-profit health insurance companies as the root of the system and setting Medicare For All as the center point the system expands from. Cutting out the for-profit companies is a cost saving measure of over 1/3 in itself, but the efficiency of treatments can be improved too, which will also save on costs. What does this mean for the every day American? No more premiums and no more deductibles is my goal.

These initial measures would give people immediate relief and a relatively fast shift to sustainability we’ve not experienced in decades!

Stay tuned! In the next part of this series I will address the cost of housing, childcare, and food and fuel prices!