When school counselors must decide which children get to eat,
it’s time to acknowledge we’re in a national affordability crisis.
The problem is the economy itself
— not just its current condition, but the underlying unfairness of how it is organized.
A friend's elderly parents live near an elementary school not far from the nation’s capital.
For several years, they had been quietly raising money to provide groceries and basic supplies for families whose children were going hungry.

When Republicans suspended SNAP benefits, the need surged overnight.
What had been a steady act of care suddenly became an emergency response.

They gathered donations from grocery stores and community members
and were able to support 102 children across four local schools.

But more than twice that many needed help.

This meant that in the wealthiest nation on earth, school counselors
— people trained to nurture children, not triage hunger
— were conscripted into the role of deciding which children would eat and which children would be left to endure hunger.

A nation that can feed its billionaires but not its children is not suffering from confusion;

it is suffering from both a crisis of conscience and a system built to protect cruelty.

And yet, even in the face of realities like this,
we are still being told that there is not a widespread affordability crisis in America.

Recently, economist Allison Schrager,
a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute,
wrote an op-ed arguing that
“there is not a widespread ‘affordability crisis’ in the U.S.,”

suggesting that while some households are struggling,
the economy is “positive for most Americans.”

She acknowledges rising food, housing, health care, and childcare costs
— but insists that because “real income growth is still positive for most Americans”
the situation should not be described as a broad crisis.

In her telling, what millions are experiencing is less a structural failure than a matter of sticker shock,
a need to readjust expectations that are too high, or simply lingering anxiety.

To reach those conclusions Schrager had to pointedly ignore a recent JPMorganChase Institute report showing that real income growth has slowed to near-decade lows,
with median real income for prime-age workers rising only about 2 percent after inflation
— and younger workers are seeing even weaker gains.

You can hear that same distance from reality echoed at the highest levels of government.

During Donald Trump’s recent national address on the economy he falsely claimed that grocery prices were falling.

In fact, grocery prices are up 2.7 percent over the past year,
a meaningful increase for families already stretched thin.

Electricity prices
— conveniently absent from Trump’s speech
— are up some 13 percent, driven in part by the explosive growth of energy-intensive data centers tied to his own push for rapid AI expansion.

These costs do not disappear because they are omitted from a speech; they show up in monthly bills.

What makes MAGA politicians and economists like Schrager economic alchemists
rather than social scientists
is that they assess the economy from the vantage point of the comfort of their own prosperity,
ignoring the evidence that working people create the nation’s wealth while the rewards are quietly captured by those already at the top.

Schrager herself once lamented in a column,
“I’m not nearly as rich as my Fidelity balance suggests.”

When the greatest hardship you are facing is a tremor in your financial investment account,
it becomes easy to declare that most people in the U.S. are doing fine.

But most people in this country do not live by Fidelity accounts.

They live by their monthly bills.

From New York City to Seattle, from sea to shining sea,
the U.S. economy is starving the poor and stuffing the rich.

In New York City during 2025, the median asking rent was about $3,599 a month,
and rents now take roughly 55 percent of the typical household’s income,
well above standard affordability thresholds.

A February 2024 report showed 50 percent of households headed by Black people were housing insecure.

truthout.org/articles/the-affo…