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.

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"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 s…