The missing half of the "affordability debate"

Our work includes tracking how the media is covering the economy — what makes the headlines, what reporters and editors find worth talking about or think will garner the most clicks…as well as what doesn’t show up on digital front pages, and what the media seems to be missing. There is no shortage of media coverage on the state of the economy — the stock market, inflation, jobs numbers, the Fed, whatever the new economic buzzword of the month is (‘boomcession’, ‘vibecession’...how many ‘cessions’ do we have to go through before something actually changes?!)

So we took a deeper look into our traditional media monitoring from this year so far. We can separate major news outlets’ coverage of the economy into five general categories: labor market sluggishness and weak hiring; the so-called affordability crisis and inflation challenges; economic policy and political dynamics; economic sentiment and consumer behavior; and sector-specific developments, which includes things like housing market rates, large-scale layoffs, or labor disputes.

We have all become familiar with — and perhaps exhausted by — the “affordability debate.” And it’s a positive, if belated, development that most major news outlets devote significant time to reporting on the cost of living for regular people.

But there’s often a key part of the story missing: workers’ pay…and how it has not increased to keep up with rising costs.

The amount of money you need to make to afford the basics in the U.S. has continued to go up year after year…along with grocery prices, health insurance premiums, gas prices, rent. A recent analysis from 2026 found that a family in the U.S. needs to make $145,000 a year just for the feeling of economic security. And the data lines up with what people are actually saying. When we asked groups of working people last year what income they thought they would need to make to feel secure, the number they landed on was $100,000 – or more, for those in higher-cost areas.

They’re working, they’re paying their bills, but they still aren’t able to get ahead. It’s not that Americans aren’t willing to work — Americans are working harder than ever before, and staying in the workforce longer than ever before. New research from Economist Enterprise tells us that Americans now expect to delay retirement by four years due to rising living costs and healthcare expenses.

But paychecks have not come even close to keeping up with both rising costs and rising productivity.

Raises are only slowing down. People are told to ‘adjust their expectations’, and even big debates, like minimum wage, are still stuck in the same place they’ve been in for years or even decades. This year will mark 17 years since the last federal minimum wage increase in 2009, making this the longest period in its history without any increase. The federal minimum wage currently sits at $7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 annually. If workers’ pay had kept pace with productivity, the minimum wage would sit around $24 per hour.

Of course, there are some people who are getting raises. Since 1978, CEO compensation has grown a staggering 1,094%, while typical workers’ compensation has only increased by 26%. CEOs now make roughly 290 times the salary of the average worker. This year, median CEO pay increased again by 10.6%, which is triple the 3.2% salary increase the average worker was projected to receive.

You would think paychecks would be seen as an essential component of “affordability.” After all, how economically secure you feel is often determined by basic math — the amount of money coming in the door minus the amount of money going out the door.

In our conversations with Americans working all kinds of jobs, that’s how most people think about it. They’re doing a constant balancing act, trying to minimize their costs any way they can — everything from obsessively tracking discount strategies on YouTube and Reddit to going without medication or health insurance. At the same time, they’re also trying to earn extra cash any way they can — from selling old possessions on Facebook marketplace or eBay to driving for Uber or DoorDash.

Yet the issue of workers’ pay is rarely discussed as central to this red-hot “affordability debate.” While the media seems to have no problem reporting on the ‘affordability’ crisis or weak job market, they often miss the broader context.

To say that we’re just now experiencing an ‘affordability crisis’ gives the impression that this is a new experience for Americans, when workers’ pay has lagged behind productivity for decades.

News is of course biased toward the new — and the root problems with our economy are anything but. Yet when the cost of living is covered without the context of ever-rising corporate profits, CEO compensation that has grown exponentially, and the dwindling share of national income that workers receive, we miss a key part of the story.

American workers are taking home their smallest share of national GDP since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track in 1947. Sites like the New York Times dutifully cover the monthly jobs report and inflation data, yet failed to report on that grim milestone at all. Talking only about costs without talking about paychecks misses half the story.

It’s why the voices of working people matter. When we talked with Americans about their economic lives, they didn’t bring up costs in a vacuum — they talked about the monthly, weekly, daily struggle of trying to make costs and income match up, and how they so often don’t.

Those voices — the voices of ordinary people just trying to make it in this country —are a key part of the affordability story. The more we include their stories and struggles in the narrative of our economy, the better policymakers can see the full picture. Amplification is where change begins.