You know it’s a crisis when more than half of people in the US are going into credit card debt to pay for essential living expenses like rent and utilities. When retirees are tapping into their retirement savings to buy groceries. When more than 36 million people in the US have reported stealing from self-checkout kiosks because of price increases—and that’s just those who admit to it.
If that wasn’t enough, healthcare and childcare costs are through the roof: the lowest-cost Silver health plan on the Affordable Care Act Marketplace has risen 77% since 2017. Electricity costs have gone up 39% since 2021, and they’ll only go up even more if the thousands of proposed new AI data centers across the country aren’t stopped in their tracks.
Even if the Strait of Hormuz is fully opened soon, which there is no guarantee of, many economists say these higher prices driven by the rising price of oil will likely last months or even years.
So on May 12, when gas topped $4.50/gallon and inflation hit its highest level since 2023, and Trump said to a reporter, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” everyone collectively thought, “Tell us something we don’t know.” Millions of people voted for Trump because he promised to do something about affordability, and now many of them are increasingly getting tired of playing “two truths and a lie” with the president—a recent CNN poll found that Trump’s disapproval rating on the economy has hit 70%.
A big part of why the economy hasn’t crashed into a recession by now is because the wealthy, like Trump and his billionaire friends, are spending the money they’ve gotten as profits from our labor, making big bets on the AI boom, and going into massive debt to finance it. The top 10% of US households now account for nearly half of all spending, according to Moody’s Analytics, which is the highest share since the late 1980s. From 1979 to 2025, the incomes of the top 1% increased by almost 200%, while our wages only increased 33%—the rich have so much money to burn because they took it right out of our paychecks.
What’s The Solution?
If you ask the Democratic Party, the answer is putting them back in office. They’re rebranding as the party of affordability, with proposals to make things like prescription drugs, childcare, utilities, groceries, and housing cheaper. But… it’s not like the cost of living wasn’t a problem when Biden and Obama each had multiple years of their presidencies where the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress. Biden and the Democrats in 2020 promised everything under the sun in order to get elected, from student loan forgiveness to raising the minimum wage, and even a public option for healthcare and free public college. None of it ever happened.
The reason neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have ever passed any of this stuff before, and the reason they certainly won’t now, is that the billionaires and big corporations are in the drivers’ seat. And the only thing that has ever forced the ruling class to relinquish some of their profits as concessions to workers is not clever negotiations in Congress—only mass movements and class struggle actually scare them.
To make any dent in the cost-of-living crisis, workers across the country need to build sustained, coordinated mass action like strikes and walkouts, in addition to protests. We need what May Day this year could have been if the leadership of the major unions had actually used their massive resources to build for it: a nationwide general strike that shuts down business as usual and reminds the bosses of who actually makes all of their profits. We need to be demanding significant pay increases, rent freezes, and a minimum wage of at least $25/hour. We need a government that would immediately take the giant energy corporations and major grocery chains into democratic public ownership, cutting our utility bills to actually affordable levels. We need to abolish the parasitic health insurance companies and tax the rich to fund free, universal healthcare.
The fight for all of these things also needs to be combined with building a huge, international movement against war and military spending, rooted in our workplaces and schools. In order to make this fight the strongest one possible, our unions and our movements need to break from both corporate parties, and instead get organized on the basis of the strength of the independent working class as the only force capable of changing society. We need to build an independent, working-class party, with a socialist program, that will mobilize mass movements in our communities and link them up across the country.
The root of the problem is even deeper than the price of prescription drugs and utility bills. The whole capitalist system that keeps the billionaires in charge is the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. As long as they stay in charge, any victories we win will inevitably be rolled back. That’s why we fight for a socialist society, where the working class can rationally organize the vast resources of this planet in a way that makes sense for all of us, not just a few at the top. We need everyone to play a role in that struggle—join us today.