Who Can’t Afford Food?

What affordability discourse gets wrong: “Nearly half of U.S. families couldn’t afford basic necessities in 2024, report finds,” reads an NPR headline from last week. “Half of Americans can’t afford to dine out or vacation in a cost of living crisis,” reads a Fortune headline from a few months ago. Meanwhile, Axios reports that “sewer socialism” is catching on across the country, describing it as an approach that “focuses on expanding government programs for the public good, like affordable housing, child care and public transportation.”

Technically, “sewer socialism” is a very old term that’s just being co-opted now to refer more vaguely to an almost New Deal sensibility: a “universal everything,” as opposed to means-tested social safety net preference. (“Sewer socialism” has historically referred to the good governance of the nitty-gritty unsexy things that cities provide: sanitation (thus the name), public housing, utilities, and streets.) But it’s true that something is afoot, related to both cost of living and quality of life—especially in urban areas—and that the policy discourse muddies a few issues by jumbling them together. Call it what you want.

“It’s like, yeah, good job reading the polls that tell you that affordability is the number one issue. Do you understand why that is the case? It’s because people can’t f–king afford to eat, so of course that’s their main issue,” Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich told Axios. This argument crops up over and over again—that a substantial portion of Americans can’t afford essentials—and is increasingly used to justify all manner of state intervention. But is it at all true?

“A real but small share of Americans are in genuinely miserable financial situations. They have more bills than they can pay. They are one missed paycheck from eviction. They frequently have literally zero money. The unemployable woman with the worthless degree from the fraudulent for-profit college is in this category. So is the 58-year-old who got laid off from a manufacturing job, exhausted his savings, can’t get hired anywhere, and watches his wife work double shifts at Walmart,” write Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Clifford Asness for The Dispatch. “These people need money. The institutions that make their lives worse—the for-profits that produce unemployable graduates, and the medical billing systems designed to confuse people into paying twice—need to be regulated or eliminated. Both of those statements are true, and neither is in serious political dispute.” They continue:

“The second problem is the squeezed-talent class, and it’s harder to explain because the people involved look fine on paper. Picture a 32-year-old physician married to a 32-year-old software engineer. Combined household income, $400,000. They cannot buy a house in San Francisco or Boston or New York within a sane commute of their jobs. They cannot afford to have three kids, pay for childcare, and put them in decent schools. They are doing every single thing the meritocratic American dream told them to do, and the dream is not being delivered. Their parents, at the same age, with worse credentials and lower real incomes, owned a house and had three kids on one salary. Something is broken here, and it isn’t their fault, and it isn’t fixed by transfers. Giving this couple a $5,000 childcare credit doesn’t move the needle on $4 million houses—and worse, by raising effective demand for childcare without doing anything about the supply, the credit makes childcare more expensive for the people behind them in line. The right tends to dismiss this couple as coastal-elite complainers. The left tends to dismiss them because they’re already in the top 5 percent of incomes. Both are wrong. This is a talent-allocation problem of the first order, and a country pays a real price when its most productive young people can’t form families or live near their work. These two problems require completely different policy responses.”

Note that the squeezed-talent class is also distinct (though sometimes overlapping) from the “why-should-I-live-within-my-means” types: The people who came of age as millennial lifestyle subsidies were expiring, who never really learned how to budget or sacrifice, who believed upward mobility would be available to them too, but became rather accustomed to a high standard-of-living in childhood and weren’t able to build on it much in adulthood (or even meet it at all).

“A lot of people set their goal as how can I have the same experience as ordering out, only at home? and the answer is you can’t!” comments The Washington Post‘s Megan McArdle. “The current generation is earning more at their age than previous generations did at their age; when you combine the fact that they have more income, and more opportunities to spend that income on food, and that all of us really love something delicious at the end of a hard day of work, food is one of the easiest things to indulge yourself with. And, on an individual, per-indulgence basis, it’s one of the cheapest.”

“The problem is people are sufficiently rich to eat a lot of takeout, but they aren’t necessarily sufficiently rich to be financially healthy (or physically healthy) if they do so,” adds McArdle. It’s partly a problem of high costs, and partly a problem of high expectations (to the extent that it’s a problem at all). And it’s also partly a problem of real gains in quality of life being obscured and taken for granted.

Each set of needs requires different public policy solutions. And I’d argue that last group doesn’t need a public policy solution at all—just a remedial home economics class (or, in their eyes, a socialist to save them).

Memorandum signed at Versailles: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other,” reads a draft of the memo, reported by Bloomberg. President Donald Trump signed the memorandum in Versailles, France, yesterday. “The agreement lifts the U.S.-imposed naval blockade of Iranian ports and, most crucially, grants Iran waivers to begin exporting its oil even before the negotiation of a final agreement on its nuclear program,” reports The New York Times. 

The more complicated issues will get hammered out over the coming weeks, starting tomorrow, when American delegates meet with their Iranian counterparts in Switzerland. “This time, the Iranians will come to the table armed with valuable knowledge: They can survive the worst the Americans can throw at them,” speculates Yaroslav Trofimov over at The Wall Street Journal. “President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that their fierce campaign of airstrikes, launched on Feb. 28 and lasting 40 days, would overthrow Iran’s theocratic regime, or at the very least force it to make major concessions. None of that happened, despite the killing of much of Iran’s senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the decimation of the country’s navy, air force and other military assets.”

Scenes from New York: Yesterday, an 18-year-old Indian tourist died after falling from a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park when the horse bolted. Some are advocating for carriage-horses to be regulated away, following the accident.

QUICK HITS

• “The Trump administration’s budget office has redirected $352 million that was intended in part for Secret Service training and recruitment to what it described as security measures at the White House, a government database shows,” reports The Washington Post.
• “It’s been quaint this week to see the G7—that talking shop for downwardly mobile world powers, plus the US—follow the White House’s Anthropic bombshell by issuing a draft communique pledging to ‘discuss’ the opportunities and risks of AI for the financial sector,” writes Lionel Laurent at Bloomberg.
• New, must-listen Ross Douthat episode: “JD Vance on the Morality of the Trump Administration.” His description: “I asked the vice president what is Christian about this White House.”
• “Los Angeles County saw the largest decline of any county in the United States in 2025, according to new census data published on March 26,” reports KTLA. “Nearly 54,000 people moved out of L.A. County between July 1, 2024 and July 1, 2025, U.S. Census data shows.”
• Who says romance is dead?

Trump on Egyptian President el-Sisi: “He was in a hotel and I met him. We fell in love, deeply in love … we didn’t know each other before that.” pic.twitter.com/oN1kjKfb6o

— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) June 17, 2026