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We Need a Shared Working-Class Agenda to Overcome Economic Hardship and Defeat Trump
If we resist getting caught up in the endless drama, divisions, and distractions—and work together to further our own slate of issues—we have the power to create meaningful change.
Jan 30, 2025
As Trump creates crisis and chaos, testing the limits of his authority and driving the news cycle, it’s critical we keep returning to what matters most to the American people. By focusing on our shared priorities and working together, we can stay grounded during the turmoil and build the power to drive positive change.
At the top of Americans' concerns is economic hardship and inequality. Ninety percent of voters told Gallup the economy was a top influence on their 2024 votes. The rising cost of housing and everyday expenses was cited as the most critical issue by both Trump voters (79 percent) and the broader electorate (56 percent).
These concerns reflect real struggles. According to the Federal Reserve, more than one-third of American adults lack the resources to handle a $400 emergency without borrowing. Families face crushing costs—median childcare runs $1,100 monthly, matching typical rent payments. Natural disasters have financially impacted nearly one in five adults.
By focusing on the issues that affect the lives of millions of Americans, we can build common ground for organizing and advocacy.
The ALICE framework helps us understand this crisis. These Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed families—now 42 percent of all U.S. households—often work multiple jobs yet still struggle to cover basics. They are our neighbors, many of them working nearby in businesses, medical facilities, and factories living paycheck to paycheck, while caring for children and elders. Many are forced to choose between rent, food, gas for the car, and paying the power bill.
Millionaire and Vice President JD Vance said at the recent “March for Life” rally in Washington, D.C., that he wished more young people would have children. Yet over half of parents surveyed said that they suffer anxiety due to not having enough money to support their family.
It is not unusual to find people living in their cars or in tent encampments, going to work at multiple jobs but unable to afford rent. The numbers of these ALICE families have grown by 23 percent since 2010 and now make up 42 percent of American households.
Meanwhile, America's billionaire class has accumulated unprecedented wealth—$6.72 trillion among 813 individuals, growing by $1 trillion in just that last nine months of 2024, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This concentration of wealth translates directly into political power that even many wealthy Americans recognize as wrong. The Patriotic Millionaires group, representing 500 wealthy individuals, has called for higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy, warning that extreme wealth concentration is corroding democracy.
In spite of his populist language, the Trump administration’s millionaires and billionaires show few signs of being interested in addressing the economic hardship of American families. The president’s true priorities were on display as the billionaires lined up to kiss the royal ring with large donations for the inauguration and were seated in the most prestigious seats at the events.
What can be done? How can ordinary people build sufficient power to put the wellbeing of ordinary families first?
The American people understand these challenges and 89 percent of them recognize that excessive political influence by the wealthy drives inequality, according to the Pew Research Center. Two-thirds believe our economic system needs major reform. Even wealthy Americans largely share these concerns, polling just 9 points lower in their worry about inequality.
With MAGA Republicans dominating Congress and the Executive Branch, national reform is tough. But if we resist getting caught up in the endless drama and distractions, and work together to further our own agenda. we have the power to create change.
- We can remind elected officials at all levels of government that their constituents expect support for child care, healthcare, education, minimum wage increases, and housing policies for working families;
- We can support state and local initiatives to tax wealth and invest in communities;
- We can keep economic hardship and inequality at the center of public discourse; and
- We can join organizations, like the Working Families Party, and build coalitions around shared economic concerns.
By focusing on the issues that affect the lives of millions of Americans, we can build common ground for organizing and advocacy. Instead of being distracted, divided, and overwhelmed, we can set our own agenda, build power together for positive change, and insist that our elected leaders act on our shared priorities.
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Investing in Childcare Would 'Massively Increase' Parents' Earnings: Study
"This kind of payoff is almost unheard of in government labor-market policies."
Oct 07, 2024
While Republican proposals for solving the childcare crisis in the presidential campaign have ranged from recruiting "grandpa or grandma" as babysitters to slashing providers' certification requirements—with presidential candidate Donald Trump failing to give a coherent answer when asked about the issue last month—a new study delivers a simple message about how the benefits of public spending on childcare significantly outweigh the costs.
Researchers at Yale and Brown universities analyzed the universal pre-kindergarten program in New Haven, Connecticut, and found that "politicians could massively increase Americans' earnings" by expanding investments in such programs.
The New Haven program began as the result of a 1996 court ruling and is open to all families in the city regardless of income—but it uses a lottery system for enrollment due to limited funding and space.
The paper the researchers published with the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that parents whose children were selected in New Haven's lottery had 11 more hours of childcare than those who weren't able to benefit from the tuition-free universal pre-K program—enough to increase the parents' earnings by 21.7% even after their kids moved on to elementary school.
That increase makes childcare spending "one of the most effective, pro-work policies in the U.S.," said Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long.
The added earnings stemmed largely from the parents' ability to continue working without taking time off to fill in gaps left by a lack of childcare, particularly because New Haven's program includes extended hours, with children able to attend as early as 7:30 am and as late as 5:30 pm.
The paper emphasizes that families that didn't get a pre-K slot still utilized other childcare programs out of necessity—but they had to pay for them out of pocket and were able to send their children to the programs for fewer hours per week than those who won the lottery.
"A few more hours of care can have long-run returns for families that are quite a bit larger than the costs of provision," Seth D. Zimmerman, a research associate at Yale who co-authored the study, told the Post.
Combining the added earnings for parents and other economic benefits associated with early childhood education, the researchers found, every dollar spent on providing tuition-free full-time childcare yielded $6 in benefits.
"This kind of payoff is almost unheard of in government labor-market policies—much higher than for most other pro-work programs, such as the earned-income tax credit," wrote Post columnist Catherine Rampell in an analysis on Monday.
The study was published days after the White House released an issue brief titledChildcare Is Infrastructure, which the Biden administration said was made evident by its $24 billion investment in the industry through the American Rescue Plan.
"Introduction of universal pre-K across various states led to increased pre-K enrollment and higher employment rates among mothers with young children in those areas on average," said the White House. "Consistent with an increase in overall economic activity, places that introduced universal pre-k also had larger increases in new business applications and the number of establishments than places that did not."
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has expressed support for expanding childcare programs and lowering costs for families, including by restoring the expanded child tax credit and providing an extra tax break for families with newborns.
The new study suggests that in the presidential campaign, "childcare should be front and center," wrote Rampell. "If you want to help workers, help them care for their kids."
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To Stop the Nuclear Arms Race, States Like the US Should Pursue Domestic Peace
While projecting power to internal and external audiences through nuclear modernization, the United States ignores insecurity at home.
Oct 04, 2024
The
Pact for the Future, adopted by world leaders at the high-level United Nations Summit of the Future in September, ambitiously calls for a world free of nuclear weapons and a recommitment to disarmament during a time when all nuclear states are undergoing nuclear modernization efforts and tensions that could indicate the beginning of a new arms race. Meanwhile, the Fragile States Index notes indicators of weakened domestic human security factors within these states. Yes, states are proliferating and modernizing their arsenals in response to rivals doing the same, but where did this cycle start, what magnifies it, and how does it impact the people within these countries?
Peace comes not only through the protection from outside threats, but by fostering individual security through strong health, educational, and justice institutions. While states invest in deterrence, human security needs go unmet, and civilians develop mistrust in the government and other countries.
The United States has seen a decline in social cohesion and an increase in state fragility over the past decade, and the fractionalized population is on even greater display this year with the upcoming election. State fragility is also evident in an increase in political violence—demonstrated by two assassination attempts of a former president—democratic backsliding, an attempt to overturn an election, extreme gerrymandering, and restricting voters’ access to the ballot box.
Spending on non-defense programs and instead investing in the civilian sector decreases unemployment rates and contributes to economic security for the public.
Looking at only high-level, international interactions misses domestic factors that contribute to countries feeling less inclined to participate in diplomatic, arms control solutions, or having more isolationist practices. In 1997, Scott Sagan published a piece called, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?: Three Models in Search of a Bomb,” explaining the lack of attention to the “domestic politics model.” Today, amid a potential start of an arms race and a massive change in the global order, these factors are once again ignored.
Diplomacy and arms control is hard between countries when the people in those countries cannot decide what to do about it.
The decline in social cohesion isn’t just reflected in levels of trust that U.S. civilians have of other U.S. civilians. If you don’t trust your next-door neighbor, you sure aren’t primed to trust someone from a different country. Low levels of social trust make a populace more vulnerable to influence using “othering” rhetoric about international enemies and even allies. So, while U.S. citizens experience insecurity and instability at home, a policy that gives the illusion that the nation is strong placates grievances.
Research shows that the public’s support for defense spending and a willingness to use force is related to low social trust.
While projecting power to internal and external audiences through nuclear modernization, the United States ignores insecurity at home.
According to a report by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the cost of a strong military also includes the forgone investments into human security:
Decades of high levels of military spending have changed U.S. government and society—strengthening its ability to fight wars, while weakening its capacities to perform other core functions. Investments in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and emergency preparedness, for instance, have all suffered as military spending and industry have crowded them out.
Project 2025, written by many former Trump administration advisers, calls for an expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously.” Countering China, and using it as a “pacer” is not only touted by the Trump campaign. The U.S. Nuclear Posture Review calls on modernization in order to deter China and its growing nuclear forces. However, even if China did reach the high end of projected growth in nuclear force, it would not be close to the 3,700 nuclear weapons that the United States has in its arsenal. The United States is undergoing a $1.2 trillion effort of nuclear modernization over the coming decades in order to keep its deterrent force strong.
From 1974 to 1987, an increase in defense spending worsened unemployment rates among Americans, but was specifically harmful to Black Americans and women. When non-defense spending increased, unemployment rates reduced. During this time, the United States was significantly proliferating its nuclear arsenal in the Cold War, and the strategic spending percent of the defense budget went from 11% to 16%. This was because the shift in spending toward a nuclear buildup necessitated hardware and technical spending rather than personnel spending.
The current budget for U.S. Nuclear Forces is $75 billion a year, however the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate for the 2023-2032 period of $756 billion is $122 billion more than the year before’s estimate of $634 billion for the 2021-2030 period. There are many other ways that the United States could spend this money than on a weapon that should never be used, but universal early childhood education (“Pre-K”) is estimated to cost $20-46 billion per year, and there would still be a few billion to spare.
Spending on non-defense programs and instead investing in the civilian sector decreases unemployment rates and contributes to economic security for the public.
In a preliminary study conducted at the Nonproliferation Education and Research Center at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, it was found that a weak security apparatus—one of the indicators in the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Global Fragility Index—was associated with a low state sentiment score in the 2005-2022 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conferences. A state’s sentiment score increases as it gives examples of its own fulfillment of its obligations under the treaty but decreases as the state blames other states for not fulfilling their obligations. In a way, it measures a state’s own sense of responsibility in the process or its willingness to blame other member states for the degradation of the system.
The findings demonstrate a relationship between domestic institutional factors and how states behave at the international level. Specifically, states that have political insecurity have a lower confidence in the NPT process. They express less confidence in other member states by calling out misactions, and do not express how they contribute directly through their own policy to uphold the nonproliferation regime.
When U.S. institutions are weakened, leaders may continue to evade responsibility by blaming all institutional issues on outside actors through scapegoating. Some scholars argue that the pursuit of a nuclear weapons program provides a unique opportunity to divert a political legitimacy crisis, such as in the case of Iran, and that activities such as the testing of nuclear weapons are so salient, they show a deliverable that gains a party in power prestige.
Global power politics does not exist in a vacuum. While understanding dynamics between states is important, state fragility is a lens through which to understand the origins of broiling tensions that prevent the pursuit of diplomatic arms control solutions. The United States is not the only state seeing a decline in social cohesion indicators; however, it is necessary to turn inward and stabilize domestic human-security factors before we can address rivals, competitors, the axis of evil, or whatever label makes us feel more secure. Addressing instability within the country will make the United States more legitimate in its claims, and institutions will have more capacity to handle outside threats as the populace is more secure.
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