I just spent an hour with economist Noah Smith, who declared generational economic progress "utterly indisputable." Meanwhile, I'm looking at BLS data showingthat the bottom 80% of Americans spend 105% of their income on basic necessities. The bottom 20% spend 181% of their income on essentials - food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, and healthcare. They're surviving only through government subsidies and debt.
Noah's response? We're "living like kings" compared to the 1950s because we have bigger houses and more food.
This conversation showed me it's not a policy tweak problem - it's about understanding how far from affordable life actually is. If politicians don't understand how far from affordability people are, there's no chance of them fixing the problem because they won't understand the scale of it.
It's like the difference between a candle you can blow out versus a house fire that needs the fire department. The scale of the problem determines the scale of your solution. But according to most economists, we don't really have a problem at all. When they talk about affordability, they mean minor price adjustments, not making life actually affordable again. There's no real solution required because economically speaking, we're in a prime spot.
When families spend more than they earn on necessities while experts celebrate progress, you get Trump. You get January 6th. You get people willing to burn it all down because the math of their lives doesn't add up, and the people who understand economics keep telling them they're wrong about their own reality.
The purchasing power of the median income has collapsed across every necessity. Housing now requires 5.6 years of median wage to purchase, compared to 2-4 years from the 1940s through 1970s. Healthcare costs have increased 10-fold per capita relative to median income. College costs have risen 252% in real terms since the 1960s. Childcare now consumes 27% of typical household income, nearly four times what experts consider affordable.
But here's what makes this crisis deeper than individual household budgets: we're also facing a public affordability crisis. Healthcare exemplifies both problems simultaneously. Those costs don't just hit families directly - they're dispersed across multiple sources: personal payments, employer contributions, government programs. Combined, our healthcare system will cost $77 trillion over the next 10 years, reaching 20% of GDP by 2033.
That's unsustainable because healthcare is pure expense - it's a service, not an exportable good that builds wealth. And our return on investment is declining. We spend more than twice as much as other OECD nations while getting worse outcomes - declining life expectancy, rising maternal mortality, worse results across the board.
To restore affordability, we need to cut healthcare costs by roughly 50%. That requires public competition, single-payer delivery, and reducing administrative costs from the mid-30% range down to single digits like other countries achieve. But here's the challenge: when you're reducing something that accounts for 20% of GDP by half, that economic activity has to be replaced or you'll trigger a depression.
That's where abundance comes in. Affordability and abundance must work together. To restore 1950s-level affordability - where median income could actually purchase middle-class life - we need to either double incomes or halve costs, probably both. That means dramatically increasing supply across multiple sectors simultaneously.
Take housing. We must increase supply to bring prices down, but how do you do that without destroying the home equity that represents most families' wealth? You create new forms of wealth. We could establish a domestic investment fund giving Americans ownership shares in manufacturing and green energy production - think Alaska's oil revenue sharing applied nationally. We could do revenue sharing on renewable energy installations. The goal is transitioning away from housing as families' primary investment vehicle, since that's driving unaffordable price increases.
These problems can't be solved piecemeal. Healthcare, housing, childcare, and education involve huge portions of our GDP and are deeply tied to our stock market. Think of it this way: if you're ripping up roads to replace water lines in Flint, Michigan, that's the perfect time to run fiber, upgrade electrical systems, and resurface the road. A Mission for America does everything simultaneously because handling these crises one at a time is hazardous to economic growth and people's daily lives.
We've done this before during major crises - the Great Depression, World War II's Arsenal of Democracy, the space race. But this requires a political moment that seems impossible in our current environment. Here's the thing: we're already in that moment. What we've seen with the Trump administration, DOGE, and attempts to completely rejigger federal offices shows that Americans are willing to accept radical government restructuring. The courts seem willing too. If that same capacity were directed toward productive ends, we could create the coordinated entities we need - agencies with power to control pricing like the War Production Board, build factories, and override patents for national interest like we did with synthetic rubber during WWII.
The pieces are falling into place. More people recognize that completely outsourcing our productivity and industrial capacity hurts this country. We need to make our own water system components, electrical equipment, solar panels, wind turbines. We need to innovate and build because shop floors connect directly to engineering rooms. That's why China leads in innovation and patent development - production, universities, engineering, and manufacturing happen in integrated ecosystems.
Building new productive capacity with coordinated housing and infrastructure - like China did over the past 20 years - increases affordability by expanding supply faster than costs rise. Combined with targeted price controls like those used during WWII, this approach works.
We can't just be a service economy because that only moves money around without creating wealth. True wealth comes from producing goods and services we need, fighting challenges like poverty, inadequate education, and climate change. Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables isn't just environmental necessity - it's economic survival. There's no point living in the past while the rest of the world moves toward the future. We don't want to become Cuba, driving 1950s cars because our economy broke down. And it won't be communism that puts us there - it will be broken capitalism.
The growing unrest we see - from Trump's election to January 6th to widespread protests - reflects working people's recognition that the old promises no longer add up. But that discontent could be mobilized toward prosperity if people believed there was a real path forward for their families, communities, and nation.
The math of middle-class life is broken. We can't sit around hoping the market fixes things - it won't. These interconnected crises require coordinated solutions at the scale of our greatest national mobilizations. The question isn't whether we need a Mission for America. The question is whether we'll build one that serves working families or continue to think we're living like kings while everything falls apart.
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