Opinion | Why a Middle-Class Lifestyle Remains Out of Reach for So Many

We papered over the affordability crisis with low prices for consumer goods, soaring asset values that kept richer Americans happy, subsidies for some Americans at certain times and mountains of debt: housing debt and student-loan debt and medical debt that kept the working class semi-afloat. But none of this addressed the core problem. For far too long, the prices of the things we need most have been growing far faster than inflation.

And so a weird economy emerged, in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most. In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free, but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.

The affordability crisis makes some sense of the last few decades of our economic debates: a crisis of housing debt, a huge new program to subsidize health insurance costs, debates about making college free and forgiving student loans, proposal after proposal for the government to pay for child care and preschool, a bubble in crypto that attracted so many investors in part because it seemed like an elevator into wealth that anyone could ride.

But now asset prices are plummeting. The cost of loans is rising. The price of consumer goods and the energy needed to make and access them has shot up. Congress is getting stingier. The high prices remain, but the policies and palliatives we used to obscure them are crumbling. (Thankfully, the Affordable Care Act remains, and I shudder to think how much worse these years would be in its absence.)

There’s a famous video where you’re told to keep your eye on a basketball being passed around and, as you do, you miss an actor in a gorilla suit ambling across the scene. But once you’ve seen the gorilla, you never miss it again. Politics works like that, too. It’s not just about the problems we have. It’s about the problems we learn to see. The prices problem has been lurking for years, but it’s never been the core of our politics. Now it is. It’s on gas station signs and at the supermarket. It’s in rental contracts and tuition checks. Even if headline inflation falls, I don’t think we’re going to unsee the high price of a middle-class life anytime soon. The political party that dominates this next era will be the one that shares the public’s fury and puts prices at the center of its agenda.