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’d bet it’s number one at every kitchen table in Florida.
The pundits treat affordability as one item on a list, next to healthcare, jobs, immigration, the economy. But it isn’t one issue among them. It’s what they all add up to.
Start with your own budget.
The average American household spent $78,535 in 2024 — about $6,545 a month. Housing takes 33 cents of every dollar, transportation 17, food 13. That’s 63 cents gone before a doctor’s visit, a school bill, or a dollar of savings. Housing tells much of the story. In 2024, 22.7 million renter households — 49 percent of all renters — spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing; more than 12 million spent over half. And it isn’t just a few expensive cities: burdens rose in 88 of the 100 largest metros over five years. Florida’s statewide rate is the nation’s highest, at 59 percent. In metro Orlando, it’s 60 percent of renters spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
Many families have no room for error: one in four households now spends more than 95 percent of its income on necessities, and the Federal Reserve found more than a third couldn’t cover a surprise $400 expense with cash. One flat tire becomes a crisis.
Now ask where these pressures come from.
Start with healthcare. America spent an estimated $5.7 trillion on it in 2025 — roughly 18 cents of every dollar in the economy — and CMS projects that share climbing toward a fifth within a decade. It arrives as your premium and your deductible; every year we postpone reform, the cost lands in your coverage.
Then the national debt, now past $40 trillion. CBO projects the government will pay about $1 trillion in net interest this year — more than the entire defense budget.
Let that sink in.
Borrowing on that scale pushes rates up across the economy — the rate you pay on a mortgage, a car loan, a credit card.
Then demographics. America is getting older — more than 11,000 of us turn 65 every day — and we’re having fewer children. CBO projects that starting in 2030, deaths will outnumber births, and from then on net immigration accounts for all population growth.
Here’s why that reaches your wallet: a shrinking workforce makes employers bid for the workers who remain. The roofer costs more. The nurse costs more. The lettuce costs more — someone has to pick it. And fewer workers means fewer taxpayers to carry that $40 trillion debt.
These may look like three separate debates in Washington. They aren’t. They meet at the kitchen table.
The rent. The grocery bill. The doctor’s visit. Gas in the car. The credit-card balance. Taxes. And whatever’s left to save.
That’s affordability.
Both parties own this. Both added to the debt. Both ducked the underlying cost of healthcare. Both failed for decades to fix immigration. Pointing fingers is easy. The math doesn’t care whose finger is pointing.
So, when a candidate promises to make life more affordable, ask how. Ask about a health system heading toward a fifth of the economy. Ask about $1 trillion a year in interest — more than we spend on defense. Ask how America grows when its workforce stops growing.
And then the real question: how does your plan reach that kitchen table?
If they can’t connect those dots, they haven’t explained affordability.
I came to this country as a student decades ago. I’ve watched America solve hard problems — but only when citizens insisted their leaders stop talking past each other and connect the dots.
The family at the checkout isn’t asking for a miracle. They’re asking their leaders to do the math.
Kam Shenai is a retired executive and civic leader in Lake Nona and co-founder of AAPI Coming Together (ACT Florida), a nonpartisan civic-participation group in Central Florida.
