Affordability Isn't One Issue. It's the Whole List.
By Kamalakar (Kam) Shenai
Watch a family at the grocery checkout. Watch the pause when the total comes up.
That pause is the American economy in 2026.
A national survey found affordability is the number one concern among Asian American voters. I would bet it is number one at every kitchen table in Florida — in every community, in every language.
The pundits treat affordability as one item on a list, next to healthcare, jobs, wars, and immigration. But affordability is not one issue among them. It is what all of them add up to.
Start with your own budget. The average American household spends $78,535 a year — about $6,545 a month. Housing takes 33 cents of every dollar.
Transportation takes 17. Food takes 13. That is 63 cents gone before a doctor's visit, a school bill, or a dollar of savings.
Rent explains much of the squeeze. Nearly half of American renters — a record 22.7 million households — pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing. One in four pays more than half. Rents have eased slightly in some markets, but the burden grew in 88 of the 100 largest metro areas over five years. Florida leads the nation, and in metro Orlando, 60 percent of renters are cost burdened.
Roughly one in four American households spends more than 95 percent of its income on necessities. And 37 percent would not cover a surprise $400 expense with cash — a number unchanged for four years. One flat tire becomes a crisis.
Now ask where those costs come from.
Start with healthcare. America spent $5.7 trillion on health care in 2025, the third straight year it grew more than 7 percent. That is roughly 18 cents of every dollar in our economy, and it is growing faster than the economy itself. Government forecasters expect health spending to reach one-fifth of everything we produce within a decade. Every year we postpone reform, that cost arrives as your premium and your deductible.
Then wars. We pay for them with borrowed money. The national debt is now roughly $40 trillion. This year the interest alone tops $1 trillion — $88 billion a month, more than we spend on defense. Borrowing on that scale pushes interest rates up. Rates set your mortgage, your car loan, your credit card.
The war shows up in your monthly bills.
Now consider immigration. It is arithmetic. Americans are having fewer children. About 11,400 Americans turn 65 every day. Starting in 2030, deaths will outnumber births — and from then on, immigration is the only thing keeping our population from shrinking. That is not opinion. It is the Congressional Budget Office. Over the past thirty years, immigrants have accounted for about half the growth of our workforce. Here is why that reaches your wallet: fewer workers mean employers bid against each other for the ones left. The roofer costs more. The nurse costs more. The lettuce costs more. Fewer workers also mean fewer taxpayers to carry that $40 trillion debt. The economy grew 1.5 percent this spring, down from 2.1 percent and below forecasts. A $30 trillion economy cannot run on a shrinking workforce.
Three separate debates in Washington. One result at your kitchen table.
Both parties own this. Both added trillions to the debt. Both ducked healthcare reform for decades. Both have failed on immigration for forty years.
Pointing fingers is easy. The math does not care whose finger is pointing.
When a candidate promises to make life more affordable, ask how. Ask about a health system heading toward a fifth of the economy. Ask how they will handle $88 billion a month in interest. Ask how America grows an economy when its workforce stops growing. If they cannot connect those three answers to your grocery bill, they have not understood the problem.
I came to this country as a student decades ago. I have watched America solve hard problems — but only when citizens insisted.
The family at the checkout is not asking for a miracle. They are asking their leaders to do the math.
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Kamalakar (Kam) Shenai is co-founder of ACT (AAPI Coming Together), a nonpartisan voter-participation organization in Central Florida and a member of the League of Women Voters Orange County.