The Blueprint for a More Affordable America Already Exists

For Theresa, a 44-year-old single mom in New Jersey, everything from the price of groceries to energy bills has risen significantly over the past six months. She was saving up to purchase a used car, which she needs because her area isn’t easily commutable via public transit. But now, she sees gas prices skyrocketing, and the amount she would need socked away for a big purchase keeps growing. She works a few hours a week for a fast-casual food franchise, usually covering shifts for large orders or when someone is out sick. But she is also a full-time caregiver for her sons, who are autistic and need round-the-clock support.

On top of rising living costs, Theresa fears that social services her family relies on will be cut. Before, she didn’t worry about these resources disappearing overnight, but then the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) paused for the first time in history during fall 2025. If it happened once, the worry remains that it could happen again, and to other resources, too.

For Theresa, the stress and uncertainty has been unbearable some days. Whether it’s food and shelter, or the services her children need to access their education, she described worrying about cost as “constant background noise,” especially as more social services have budgets reduced or implement stricter requirements. “I wake up several times a night worried about the future and how I will manage to provide what my children need,” she said.

It just feels like something has to give, Theresa continues. “Everyone knows that there’s an affordability crisis… but what are the plans? How are we getting out of it?”

To say the cost of living is high is an understatement. A report on the growing cost of health care stated that one-third of Americans have made a trade off in daily living expenses, including skipping meals or cutting back on utilities, to afford health care. Food costs remain high. A report from 2024 estimated that about 134,000 families were pushed into poverty a year due to childcare expenses alone. Meanwhile, a sluggish labor market has made finding employment difficult, and according to the Economic Policy Institute, low- and middle-wage workers have dealt with decades of suppressed wage growth. Though President Donald Trump might claim the affordability crisis is “a hoax,” the reality is that affordability is a major issue for voters, impacting people’s ability to live day-to-day and stealing opportunities to plan for, or even imagine, a better future.

“We have seen that many working-class people just no longer feel that the American Dream of being in the middle class is attainable to them,” said Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative. “For many, it is really just about the simple fact of having the security and stability of being able to afford the basics.”

It’s impossible to address the affordability crisis without also addressing the economic inequality that underpins society—including the policy choices that have created and deepened disparities. One report from Brookings showed that one-third of middle-class families are struggling to afford basic necessities, and affordability is even more out of reach for families of color. Among policy suggestions, including decreasing the cost of living and raising wages, the report stresses that solutions have to address systematic disparities in everything from homeownership to health care.

“The kind of inequalities that we see today can be traced back to policy decisions that made it easier to build what we know now [as] a white middle class,” said Fenaba R. Addo, professor of public policy at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, whose work focuses on the role of economic resources in the lives of families. “[Through] home ownership, through education, these kinds of levers were either systematically denied or made it harder for Black Americans to access those things.”

When she hears about enthusiasm for “baby bonds”—accounts funded by the government at a child’s birth—or opportunity accounts, it’s not surprising that it’s appealing to people. “It’s not unprecedented within our country to provide money and support and help with home ownership and things like that, to give people a starting chance,” she explained.

While the government has made such efforts in the past, today, while Americans struggle to get by, elected officials spend seemingly endless funding, literally billions of dollars, on wars, militarized police forces, and ICE. In a direct attack on everyday Americans, last year, the Trump administration’s H.R. 1 gutted SNAP and Medicaid, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in America.

Experts stress that America has the resources to make life more affordable. And frequently, communities are fighting for those solutions themselves, from movements for student-debt cancellation or student loan forgiveness to tenants organizing to fight for affordable housing or needed repairs. Developing policy that pulls people out of survival mode has to be part of addressing affordability, according to Isha Weerasinghe, director of public benefits justice at the Center for Law and Social Policy. “We want to move forward, move above existing to thriving,” explains Weerasinghe. That means not just being in a place of paying to exist, or the stress of making ends meet, but being able to think about spending money on things you enjoy, too. “That seems very simplistic, but it’s so important,” said Weerasinghe. “Why can’t we all deserve that?”

State and local governments are stepping up to give their citizens a ‘fair shot’

In November 2025, the Groundwork Collaborative, in partnership with the Local Progress Impact Lab and State Innovation Exchange, released the Affordability for All Agenda, which spells out policies that can be executed on the state and local level to make life more affordable.

“Our diagnosis of the problem is [that] people want life to be more affordable, but they recognize that the reason why it isn’t is because wealthy corporations, wealthy individuals, have really worked with politicians to rig our economy against working families,” said Pancotti. What affordability means to them is having a “fair shot in our economy,” or having the ability to both afford the basics and be fulfilled at work and in their communities.

The agenda, according to Pancotti, puts forward 10 policies that can be adapted to any level of government to make life more affordable. Policies include capping utility rates or a Medicaid buy-in program, which lets individuals purchase Medicaid plans even if they don’t qualify under current requirements. It also includes a policy on junk fees, or needless “convenience” and “processing” fees that eat up time and money while ballooning costs of an item or event.

The practicality is important, Pancotti said. She noted that, in addition to being where it feels possible to govern at this moment, polling shows people have more positive feelings about state and local lawmakers, as opposed to federal ones. “They are more connected to them. They are in their community. They’re more visible,” she said. She points to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as one example. He filled 100,000 potholes in his first 100 days in office. Not only does it mean people aren’t paying for car damage from the potholes, city services filling potholes on someone’s street is a visible example of government action.

People “really want you to focus on tangible benefits in their lives and deliver them very quickly,” she said, adding that even when there is positive policy in Washington, it can take too long to reach people.

Affordability is about more than prices

When it comes to affordability, common efforts go to driving down prices alone, according to Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economy Policy Institute. But “affordability is the outcome of the race between incomes and prices. You want to make sure incomes are always ahead in that race and growing faster over time,” Bivens explained.

But over the past 30 or 40 years, wages for the majority of Americans have lagged behind what the economy could’ve paid out, said Bivens, explaining that labor markets under capitalism are tilted toward employers. Policy must rebalance that. To start, Bivens said minimum wage has to rise consistently. The federal minimum wage is now effectively a joke, Bivens said, and though some states and cities have moved theirs ahead, it’s uneven.

Next is ensuring unemployment remains low for long periods of time. While this might sound like stating the obvious, the benefits stretch beyond just making an income: Low unemployment rates increase worker negotiating power and maintain their value. Threatening to quit is one way workers have leverage, Bivens explained, but that disappears if the labor market isn’t really strong. A report from the Economic Policy Institute showed that in low-unemployment labor markets, workers who are historically marginalized or work low-wage jobs have faster wage growth; one example, the report notes, is that during the initial years of the pandemic, employers of low-wage workers had to work harder—and pay more—to retain them. At the same time, the report explained, expanded child tax credits, direct payments, and food assistance happening at that time also strengthened the labor market.

To that end, expanding unions and collective bargaining is also critical to letting the middle class grow, according to Bivens, who explained that the only time the United States saw fair, fast growth in the economy was in the 30 years after World War II, when unions were strong.

The extent to which these solutions aren’t possible is purely politics, Bivens said. “Other countries have done it. We’re not a poor country. We have the money for many more people to have a much better living standard in this country,” he said. “It just needs to be distributed in a fairer way.”

What if we expanded the social safety net?

There is an important, common thread with all of the proposed solutions: Many have already been proven to work, not just in other countries, but in America.

For example, Taylor Jo Isenberg, executive director of the Economic Security Project, pointed to the enhanced child tax credit. According to the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, back in 2021, the child tax credit expansion, coupled with stimulus payments, was responsible for the largest one-year drop in child poverty ever recorded. Not only did it provide meaningful stability and relief for families in the midst of a crisis, Isenberg said, the money actually increased the earning potential of families over the course of their lifetimes.

“It’s so important to think about this as a structural problem and not a short-term inflation problem,” said Isenberg. There are a set of solutions that could help address the affordability crisis head-on, she added, including universal childcare, moving toward universal healthcare coverage, and more income in all forms, such as raising wages or providing income supplements.

Similarly, in regard to the baby bonds Addo mentioned, some state and local governments are already attempting such investments. According to the Center for American Progress, Montgomery County, Maryland and Connecticut are examples of how investments at birth can grow by the time someone reaches 18. Meanwhile, report after report shows the effectiveness of guaranteed income programs, including those that are designed to be temporary. At the state and local level—or even through community-based organizations—people are already benefiting. Policies like paid leave are popular and have bipartisan support (some states implemented or improved paid leave programs in 2025); universal childcare is also gaining support, and most Americans support free or low-cost daycare.

It will take political will, but it’s all solvable, Isenberg said. It’s not about believing there’s only one answer, she said, and instead “recognizing that, when we talk about affordability, we’re actually talking about: Does the economy work for everyone?”

Right now, the country is experiencing high inflation, labor cuts, trade restrictions, and the devastation of H.R. 1. Weerasinghe and the CLASP team want to think about a public benefits system that is more inclusive. For example, while the team works on SNAP reform, they are also thinking about food sovereignty, or solutions that have worked for communities for centuries despite disinvestment. Weerasinghe stresses that expanded inclusivity also ensures that immigrants are able to access all benefits. Then, what supports that in terms of revenue is building strategies around tax benefits to improve the system, like the child tax credit or the earned income tax credit.

If more people are able to access resources, it means more buy-in to the system, which means more people can get the services they need. For example, Weerasinghe explained, if more people have access to Medicaid, and there were less restrictions on how providers were able to reimburse for their services, it means more money in the health care system. Or, take SNAP: When there are less people who are receiving SNAP, while food prices are going up, fewer people participating means less purchasing power. That, in turn, impacts small businesses as well as larger ones—and since it impacts their profits, it leads to job cuts, which will affect the economy overall. More inclusivity benefits the economy across the board.

For people like Theresa and her family, she knows firsthand how these policies could actually make life easier and more affordable. “Taxpayer money should be spent investing in the present and future of our country,” she said, “not gutting social programs to provide tax cuts for corporations and billionaires.”

“The purpose of social programs—a lot of them were built in the ’60s, in the time of the civil rights movement as well—they’re built as a bridge to ensure that people have access to services and to make sure that all people have an ability to survive, but also to thrive,” Weerasinghe adds.  “I think we have somehow come back to square one with this, and we have forgotten the purpose of why those programs were built in the first place.”