The Good Life Agenda

Affordable, high-quality healthcare is fundamental to a good life. Good health is strongly linked to higher earnings, increased happiness, social connection, and economic mobility. Unfortunately, the American healthcare system fails to deliver on its most basic duties.

There is perhaps no greater example of the limits of market-first ideology than America’s dysfunctional and fragmented healthcare system. The American healthcare system is far from a free market, but our system is full of policies that try to pretend it is. By approaching health services as commodities rather than rights and prioritizing corporate profit extraction over patient care, our policies have built a healthcare system riddled with consolidation and market power, perverse incentives, and a tangled web of financial interests among providers, insurers, and middlemen.

The consequences for the public are severe. A majority of Americans struggle to afford medical care and medications. Medical bills are a top financial worry and a leading cause of bankruptcy. In April 2026, over a third of adults said they had skipped or postponed needed healthcare because of the cost in the past 12 months. And in 2022, over 40 percent of adults, a disproportionate share of them Black and Hispanic, said they held medical or dental debt. Even for those with coverage, burdensome insurance processes, opaque pricing, profit-seeking middlemen, and a scarcity of primary care providers make it difficult to get needed care.

Comprehensively shifting how Americans get and pay for healthcare will require a coordinated slate of reforms to address the fundamental drivers of cost—an effort that will likely require deploying the full good-life policy toolbox. This includes but is not limited to:

• Antimonopoly policy: Barriers to horizontal and vertical integration, stronger merger reviews, and price regulation. The leading driver of rising insurance premiums is rising hospital prices, largely due to mergers that have allowed 21 percent of hospitals to effectively become monopolies. In addition to greater antitrust enforcement to address hospital consolidation, policymakers should seriously consider breaking up vertically integrated entities like UnitedHealth Group, where the roles of insurer, pharmacy benefit manager, and care provider are combined under a single corporate umbrella. In the absence of new legislation, agencies should conduct stronger merger reviews to confront rampant industry consolidation and the resulting conflicts of interest. Where consolidation and market power already exist, regulation can stop anticompetitive behavior. For example, Indiana passed a landmark law in 2025 requiring nonprofit hospitals to maintain average inpatient and outpatient prices at or below the statewide average or risk losing their valuable nonprofit tax status.
• Public options: Public health insurance and/or direct delivery. A public option for health insurance could drive down healthcare costs and offer an affordable alternative. Various iterations of public options are under consideration—from opening up Medicare to younger populations, to offering a public option to compete with plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, to moving toward a single-payer, Medicare for All system. Each of these proposals aims to create a viable coverage competitor to the private sector, forcing private insurers to lower premiums, reduce administrative waste, and negotiate better provider contracts. Less discussed but equally important, policymakers should also consider the ways a public option could deliver (not just finance) healthcare. For instance, policymakers could invest more resources into Federally Qualified Health Centers, community clinics, regional public hospitals, and Veterans Affairs–style networks—all of which serve essential functions in offering care, especially to vulnerable populations.
• Countervailing power: Patient organizing. The US has a rich history of patient organizing to reclaim power from a commercialized healthcare system. Groups like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) successfully forced the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health to reform the drug approval process and give patients a role in research. Just this year, the Patients Union was established to build solidarity, support, and power among patients and others harmed by “healthcare delays, denials, debt, and impossible choices.” Public policy expanding access to healthcare should deliberately foster the building of membership organizations as a long-term counterweight to corporate power in the medical industry, ensuring that the healthcare ecosystem can finally be held accountable for delivering affordable, high-quality care.

Despite spending significantly more on healthcare compared to our counterparts, the US has among the lowest life expectancy among peer nations, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, and the worst maternal and infant mortality rates. We can’t ensure a good life for all as long as we allow dismal statistics like these to persist.

Decades of studies show that stable, high-quality childcare is good for children and their parents, whether those parents are in the workforce (69 percent of households with children have all parents in the paid workforce) or stay home with their children.

Yet on average, childcare costs more than housing for most families in the country. In all 50 states plus Washington, DC, the price of center-based care for two children exceeded average annual rent payments. In every state, families making the median income are paying far more for care than the threshold the US Department of Health and Human Services defines as unaffordable, with childcare costs exceeding 7 percent of income. The problem of finding affordable childcare persists after children enter school, as parents must scramble to cover summers, after-school hours, and holidays.

The price of care has driven many women fully out of the workforce. Indeed, it is difficult to estimate the true extent of the childcare affordability crisis in part because low-income families, often unable to afford care at all, must reduce their work hours rather than pay for care. Sociologist Jessica Calarco found that only 7 percent of stay-at-home moms had household incomes over $100,000, a full 75 percent of them lived in households with yearly incomes under $50,000, and half had yearly household incomes under $25,000. It is therefore not surprising that 70 percent of stay-at-home parents said they would take up more paid work if more affordable childcare was available.

And even families with stay-at-home parents need some amount of external care. There are demands on full-time caregivers’ time outside of the care they provide—including, in many cases, some paid work—just as there are life demands on full-time paid employees’ time. A 2024 survey by Capita found that the majority of stay-at-home parents needed external childcare several times each month, and a full third reported needing external childcare weekly or daily.

As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, childcare, like medical care, is a classic example of a market failure. The cost of childcare is driven by staff pay, but the people we pay to watch our youngest children typically make some of the lowest wages in the workforce. About 20 percent of childcare workers are immigrants, and the vast majority are women, making this workforce especially vulnerable to exploitation. Margins are small despite low wages, and operation costs are high, especially for infant and toddler care, where the staff-child ratio must be much lower for obvious safety and quality reasons. Meanwhile, raising prices to raise wages or profits is impossible for most childcare providers because current costs are already bleeding families dry. As a result, staff turnover is high, and there are not enough childcare slots to meet demand in many regions of the country.

The only way to solve this Gordian knot and build a functional universal childcare system is through sustained and significant public investment. A universal, public option for childcare would give parents and their children access to the care they need while ensuring workers make a family-sustaining wage. It would also provide important competition to the private-equity backed childcare centers that are increasingly consolidating power in the industry. A universal program should also be structured with tools that intentionally build countervailing power among workers and parents; indeed, Head Start already does this through collective bargaining with staff at many sites (represented by the American Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees International Union, and other locals like District Council 37 in New York City) as well as designated parent committees for oversight.

The build-out of a universal public option must follow some key principles to ensure it is creating the conditions for families and workers to build good lives:

While this report does not go into depth on other parts of the care economy, a public option for long-term care for the elderly and people with disabilities and chronic conditions is also an essential component of a good life agenda. Many of the same market failures that define the childcare industry also define the long-term care industry, failing both consumers and workers. Further, many of the same families struggling with childcare also struggle to afford long-term care. An estimated quarter of US adults are part of the “sandwich generation,” caring for aging parents and young children at the same time.

Currently, Medicaid is the largest insurer of long-term care. Fifty-eight percent of Americans incorrectly believe that Medicare covers long-term care, when Medicare actually only has limited and short-term coverage for ongoing care needs. Because Medicaid is the dominant insurer, people who need long-term care often must impoverish themselves to receive it, or are surprised to find they do not qualify for it when they begin needing care. This is not a sustainable option.

Building straightforward and universal public care options has an added benefit: By eliminating the complicated and expensive administrative obstacles that define the current care economy, we can turn a consistent pain point into a more positive touchpoint with government.

As they manage the logistics and expenses of caring for young children and elderly parents, many parents must also begin thinking about and saving for what comes after their children’s graduation. A good life requires having choices, and the choice to pursue higher education—one which not everyone will make—should not require two generations of long-term financial planning.

While higher education can be the right decision for many, years of studies show that wages stagnated for decades even as employers’ demand for degrees rose. At the same time, average tuition at both public and private four-year institutions nearly doubled between 1995 and 2025, even after accounting for inflation. Simultaneously, beginning in the 1990s, for-profit college enrollment skyrocketed under a business model that preyed on students through aggressive recruiting tactics, siphoned their federal aid, and left them with high levels of debt (and often, no degree). This process intersected with the Great Recession to drive up millennial student debt rates so that in 2024, years after most graduated from college, millennials still held almost 40 percent of all outstanding student loan debt. Soon, many millennials still paying down their own student loans will start to see their children enter the cycle themselves.

Millennials’ large student debt load drove a movement for mass student loan cancellation that ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which struck down the Biden administration’s attempt to meet this popular demand. But student debt cancellation was only ever one small part of the policy solution required. A functional higher-education system requires deploying a range of good-life governing tools:

• Public option: A free college system. Establishing a free college option is essential long-term. The federal government must begin by investing in tuition-free public institutions. Such an investment could take many forms, from state partnerships to direct federal provisioning to a radically expanded public grant system. Public options for higher education must include technical and community colleges, where for-profit institutions also take advantage of students, alongside four-year institutions. These investments should also include public funding for registered apprenticeships and partnerships that preserve wage standards and worker voice.
• Industrial policy: Oversight boards. As long as government-backed student loans and grants are helping fund higher education, policymakers should create oversight boards to set strict rules about what colleges and universities can charge. Funding requirements should also limit the power of wealthy trustees, who can pose as much of a threat to free speech on campus as federal actions. These kinds of guardrails are common in other industries that receive government investment and can ensure that public funding does not end up lining the pockets of exploitative for-profit higher education institutions.
• Countervailing power: Empowering student and faculty stakeholders. New federal funding streams can provide a counterweight to the power of trustees by incentivizing engagement and organizing by a wide variety of stakeholders in university governance, from students to faculty.

In recent years, the Trump administration and state governments have weaponized public higher education funding to exert control over curriculum and speech at universities. Yet there is no way to build a more permanently accessible system without public funding. We must consider how to use such funding to make our institutions more resilient to attacks on free speech, so they can serve their primary functions—educating young people, training future workers, and producing critical research—without fear of private or state coercion. And higher education institutions must be accessible to everyone, not just the elite and their children, in order to truly serve those functions.

When families are planning their budgets, they shouldn’t have to choose between heating a home, filling a gas tank, or putting food on the table. And yet that’s what our current energy policies, and our overreliance on volatile fossil fuels, have forced some to do.

Energy cost shocks are unusually difficult to absorb because families have almost no ability to adjust their usage patterns, meaning energy costs pass almost undiluted to family budgets. Most Americans drive to work, and often have no other option. Few parts of the country have significant mass transit infrastructure, and the lack of affordable housing, particularly in cities, means the average one-way commute time is nearly 30 minutes.

As many of our international peers show us, it doesn’t have to be this way. US energy policy is a global outlier: We have a large domestic fossil fuel sector, but minimal state involvement. As a result, even as the US produces more oil and gas than any other country in the world, it generates less public income and does less to manage domestic costs than its energy-rich peers. As Americans have witnessed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hormuz crisis this year, domestic oil production does not prevent spikes in American gas prices. The price families pay at the pump is set on a global market, whether they are filling their tanks with gas from Alaska or Azerbaijan. And there is little that government can do to compel more production in a turbulent fossil fuel sector that acts on behalf of shareholders.

While oil drives the most dramatic energy shocks, the broader energy picture was already worrisome before the latest international crisis. Cost pressures in the energy sector aren’t going anywhere. Wildfires, extreme weather, and aging infrastructure are raising the cost of maintaining a reliable electric grid, while the growth of the US liquefied natural gas export industry has begun putting upward pressure on electricity and natural gas heating rates. And data centers are already beginning to spike US electricity demand, with wide-ranging projections and few concrete plans for meeting future energy use needs.

Yet for all the complexities of the energy sector, the solutions to energy cost shocks in the long run are straightforward in practice. The United States must produce more energy domestically, and it must be in forms that limit negative climate impacts and are protected from the shocks that come from global politics. If policymakers make full use of the governing tools available to them, a wide range of policies can effectively move such an agenda forward:

• Industrial policy: Public funding for clean energy technology. The US has so much potential energy production that industrial policies can have outsize benefits. Public funding to encourage the development and scaling of clean energy technologies will generate lower and more predictable costs for families alongside better-paying and more stable jobs. Because these technologies are not subject to fuel cost shocks, they can both reduce energy prices and make those prices less vulnerable to global events. While we grow clean energy, we can also invest in and actively manage US energy storage to stabilize domestic prices against global shocks.
• Public options: A public stake in domestic fuel production. As long as fossil fuel production remains a part of our energy policy, policymakers should seriously consider how to publicly manage the industry to more directly benefit Americans. By following the lead of countries like Norway and taking a significant stake in domestic fuel production, the US could stabilize prices and wind down its reliance on fossil fuels while maintaining production capacity necessary to shape markets and national security. At the same time, taking such a stake would ensure that the returns on energy profits would be broadly shared.
• Antimonopoly policy: Utility regulation. In an era of growing electricity demand, policymakers should consider the full range of antimonopoly tools to regulate utilities that control access to electricity. For example, federal as well as state regulators should use their authorities to reconsider the rate of return that utilities receive for capital expenditures to reduce those returns closer to the cost of capital. Further, utilities should be compensated not just for total capital expenditures but for investments that lower consumer costs by improving performance, and integrating diverse transmission technologies and sources of energy. The federal government should also be very skeptical of mergers that further consolidate utilities. Additionally, utilities that own power lines and generate electricity can too easily exert monopoly power by expanding their regulated electricity distribution monopolies to advantage the unregulated power plants they own. Breaking these functions up completely offers a path to a more efficient, cleaner, and more competitive electric system at lower cost.

These are just a few examples of how a new governing tool kit could lower energy costs in the short and long term. Energy conservation, management, and generation are complementary to each other: Stabilizing energy costs, and building an energy grid that can withstand current and future demands, will require them all. With a stable, sustainable energy grid, families will not have to budget for global upheaval they have no way of predicting, and future generations will be in safer hands.

Workers’ ability to get a good job depends not only on their skills or effort, but on the labor market they find themselves in. We should be able to choose jobs that work for us, not have to fight for a toehold in any job at all.

Under the neoliberal paradigm, policymakers often assumed they were governing a labor market where workers and employers were on an equal playing field, experiencing perfect competition. Now we know that workers and employers do not meet as equals; concentrated power among employers gives them a structural advantage. To maximize workers’ agency in the labor market, policymakers need to use a range of policy tools to level the playing field and set baselines across industries and employers. Unfortunately, they’ve left a lot on the table, and both public policies and corporate practices have suppressed workers’ wages in the US for decades. Too infrequent periods of tight labor markets have produced real gains, but not enough to offset decades of wage stagnation and rising essential costs.

Effectively deploying a good-life tool kit can reset workers’ experience and expectations in the labor market:

• Monetary policy: Full employment. Prioritizing full employment is the most successful approach to raising incomes. Workers not only earn higher wages when the labor market is competitive and full employment holds, but they can also find jobs that better fit their skills and needs, making workers and the businesses that employ them more productive and fueling economic growth.
• Antimonopsony policy: Minimum wage and overtime laws. Instead of allowing employers to compete by driving pay below a decent standard of living, these policies set a national floor and push business models toward greater productivity, higher retention, and higher-quality jobs. Because only 1 percent of hourly workers earn at (or below) the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, unchanged since 2009, it no longer functions as a meaningful floor. As a result, employers can set wages woefully short of what is necessary for workers to maintain a minimum standard of living. Congress should set a national wage floor closer to a living wage for the typical single worker without children, making the final steps from a federal minimum wage to a living wage less of a leap and ultimately more achievable for state legislators, workers, and unions across the US. That means a minimum wage of at least $20 per hour in 2030 and set to keep rising. Policymakers should reinforce this increase by eliminating subminimum wages for certain disabled and tipped workers, as well as by raising and then regularly updating overtime salary thresholds. (The following section discusses overtime laws at more length.)
• Public option and taxes: Public healthcare, retirement savings options, and portable benefits. The US is relatively unusual in encouraging workers to access both a secure retirement and healthcare through their employers. Tax incentives encourage this pattern, which at best reduces employee mobility and, worse, in our increasingly fissured and gigified economy, limits many workers’ access to these benefits. Creating public retirement savings and healthcare options (both discussed further in other sections) or encouraging the funding of portable benefits through the tax code could set a baseline of security for workers, allowing them more freedom of movement in the labor market.

Other public options could also play a key role in shaping the labor market. For instance, building national employment programs and national service pathways could address youth unemployment and worker displacement.

The best jobs are ones that give us not just economic security but a say in how and under what conditions we do our work. Historically, unions have been the most effective pathways to these quality jobs, raising wages, improving benefits, reducing inequality, and strengthening workplace safety.

It’s a policy failure, then, that despite historically high public support for unions, less than 6 percent of private-sector workers now belong to one—the result of a half-century of weakening the laws that support labor organizing. All the while, public-sector collective bargaining rights are uneven across states, due to legal restrictions on organizing and persistent attacks by federal leaders.

The election-and-litigation model administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was not built for today’s market structure. Workers now organize in markets defined by concentrated firms with extreme power in the labor market. Further, today’s labor market is shaped by part-time and gig work mediated by emerging technologies that weaken workers’ leverage and complicate traditional bargaining. Even when workers win union elections—often facing retaliation and obstruction—many struggle to secure a first contract. Policymakers should take immediate steps to strengthen penalties and streamline elections within the existing structures of our labor law. But these moves will not, on their own, rebalance power as needed, especially at a moment when the independence and effectiveness of the NLRB have been systematically eroded.

We should do everything we can to support worker organizing and ensure every worker has a real path to collective bargaining, rebuilding that countervailing power. The goal shouldn’t be to recreate an imperfect past. Even at its peak, when roughly one-third of private-sector workers were union members, the US lagged peer nations in collective bargaining coverage. We need a bargaining framework suited to our modern markets, shaped by these tools:

• Countervailing power: Sectoral bargaining laws. Reimagining labor law more expansively requires expanding bargaining beyond individual workplaces. Sectoral bargaining policies allow workers, including those outside of traditional employment (such as workers on digital platforms), to set baseline labor standards. These standards lower the incentive for firms to cut wages or undermine working conditions in order to compete. Effective designs build worker power, rather than simply acting as advisory wage boards detached from organizing. These laws should also be crafted to allow workers to bargain across sectors over shared concerns, including the use of AI, workplace surveillance, and other technologies that now shape jobs across the economy.
• Antimonopoly and antimonopsony policies: A ban on employer practices that distort labor markets. We have ample evidence that increasingly concentrated corporate power in labor markets weakens workers’ wages, agency, and ability to organize. When a small number of companies control a sector, firms can trap workers with opaque pay, restrictive contracts, fissured employment, and other deliberate attempts to reduce worker power. In addition to using enforcement tools to encourage competition within sectors, policymakers should deploy bright-line tools that push back on these coercive corporate practices. For example, federal agencies should clarify enforcement standards that prevent misclassification in fissured industries. Lawmakers should eliminate noncompete agreements and similar restrictive agreements that trap workers in place, along with pay secrecy practices, all of which keep workers from moving to better jobs and bargaining on an equal footing. In addition, eliminating mandatory arbitration and strengthening private rights of action would make rights usable in practice.

As corporate power has risen and unionization fallen, the gap between rights on paper and bargaining power in reality has widened. Policymakers need to creatively expand workers’ formal rights, deploying tools from across a good-life governing toolbox, but regulators must also immediately strengthen labor law enforcement. Biden-era coordination between the NLRB, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and other agencies shows that parts of this agenda can move quickly when policymakers across government prioritize building workers’ labor market power.

Addressing the Challenges of AI

There is real uncertainty about how AI will impact the labor market. Some economists see a sweeping transformation, while others expect a slower adjustment. No matter how large the disruption turns out to be, history shows that even when employment recovers from shocks, workers caught in a transition often experience long-term income loss and instability.

The possibility of significant AI impacts on the labor market makes the good-life income agenda all the more pressing. If workers are to benefit from this technological transition, baseline policy conditions for a healthy labor market are a prerequisite, but they’re also insufficient.

Employers decide whether to use AI to augment labor, supervise performance, or eliminate roles entirely. Over the past several decades, many firms have used new technologies to intensify monitoring, discipline workers without transparency, and weaken bargaining leverage. AI can accelerate those patterns if policymakers fail to act.

To combat this trend, workers should have a real seat at the table when employers introduce AI systems. Worker protections should include aspects like notice when AI tools change job duties, and a right to an explanation and mechanisms to challenge the outcomes if AI influences hiring, pay, or discipline. A broader response should also include limits on surveillance and data collection and accountability for discriminatory outcomes. These rights should apply even if workers don’t belong to a union. But it is critical that workers be able to bargain over how AI is introduced and used on the job.

Yet, even under a well-governed system, some workers will lose jobs during this transition. Congress should establish AI adjustment insurance, modeled in part on Trade Adjustment Assistance. However, TAA was often too narrowly targeted and too dependent on long retraining periods. A better approach would deliver faster income protection and optional high-quality training, with real mobility assistance for those engaged. This could be combined with a digital-sector tax to fund transitional income for those who don’t qualify for unemployment insurance and wage insurance for those who come back to work at lower pay.

When disruption hits a region or occupation, policymakers should also be prepared to create direct public job pathways tied to care, climate resilience, public health, and community modernization to ensure that AI-generated wealth supports the public good.

Policymakers should also consider a national service pathway aligned with technological transition. Such a structured service program could place young people and displaced workers in community-led projects centered around infrastructure development or public-interest technology roles. The program would create a new civic bridge between school and long-term employment that converts a period of transition into an investment in democratic life.

The point is not to slow technological progress, but to govern it so that productivity growth strengthens worker power rather than widening inequality.

We should all have the ability to retire with dignity, without fear that our savings could run out if we have the privilege to grow old. And people with disabilities should have access to both economic security and real choices, including the ability to save money or get married without fear of losing benefits.

Before Social Security, retirement security was nearly unheard-of for working-class Americans, with most nonworking elderly adults dependent on others for support. Since the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, the program has formed the foundation of retirement and disability security in the United States. Formally known as Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), the program provides monthly benefits to retired workers, surviving family members, and workers who become disabled. Its reach is nearly universal. The overwhelming majority of retirees earn income through Social Security. Without Social Security benefits, roughly 37 percent of adults age 65 and older would fall below the poverty line. As such, Social Security is probably America’s best-known public option.

Alongside Social Security, the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides an income floor for older adults and people with disabilities. Yet most SSI recipients live below the poverty line, based on program design choices that have failed to keep up with economic reality.

Put together, these programs represent what should be a core democratic promise: that aging or developing a disability should not mean destitution. But that promise now faces two related challenges.

First, due in large part to growing wage inequality and the economic stagnation following the Great Recession, Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund is projected to face reserve depletion in the early 2030s unless Congress takes action. This is an important reminder that the successful use of monetary policy tools impacts critical public options. If Congress does nothing, incoming payroll tax revenue would still cover a substantial share of benefits, but automatic cuts would materially harm current and future beneficiaries.

Second, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has endured years of underinvestment and, more recently, political attacks on its staffing and operations. Staffing shortages and service delays have weakened public trust. The response, however, should not be privatization. A well-funded SSA should build trust in government and serve as a model of what competent public administration can deliver: reliable service to tens of millions of Americans.

We need to address Social Security’s finances now, well before reserve depletion approaches. And we should see it as an opportunity to reaffirm a few key principles that have always defined the program:

We have to refresh Social Security for the modern age as well, updating what the program considers work and how it approaches today’s labor markets. Doing so can further expand its reach and bring it closer to universality. For example, millions of Americans leave the labor market every year to temporarily care for children, aging parents, or family members with disabilities. Those caregiving years can reduce lifetime earnings, which then lowers retirement benefits. A modern Social Security system should credit caregiving toward benefit calculations, recognizing this unpaid labor as socially valuable work.

Policymakers must also modernize SSI in the near term. Benefits are too low, the program’s asset limits are outdated, and in-kind support rules penalize families who get community support. If SSI is to function as a true floor beneath Social Security, it must provide adequate support for older adults and people with disabilities.

There’s a reason Social Security is one of the most broadly supported public programs in the country. The program’s progressivity and defined benefits have protected families for nearly a century. That popularity is a reminder that when our government delivers tangible economic security at scale, it strengthens public trust. Strengthening the program will preserve its promise for decades to come.

Social Security provides a stable foundation of retirement security in the United States, but it was never meant to be the entirety of retirees’ income. Yet approximately 14 percent of Social Security recipients 65 and older rely on Social Security for over 90 percent of their income. The private retirement savings system that the majority rely on as a supplement was built on top of Social Security. Alarmingly, that system has become increasingly insecure in recent decades. Many employers that once offered defined benefit pensions—programs that guaranteed a stable monthly payment in retirement—have chosen to give them up. Those plans were largely replaced by defined contribution accounts, such as 401(k)s, which require workers to contribute their own earnings while shouldering investment risk.

Research has documented how this shift transferred risk from institutions to households. Instead of pooling lifespan and market risks, the current system asks individuals to navigate them on their own. Even when markets rise, gains have not created broad financial security. A downturn at the wrong moment can wipe out years of savings.

What’s more, nearly a third of working-age households have no retirement accounts at all, and many workers cannot afford to contribute regularly. Younger adults are especially unlikely to have tax-preferred retirement accounts or pensions and are less likely to say their retirement savings are on track.

Getting Americans’ retirement savings back on track will require multiple tools from the good-life toolbox:

• Public option:
  • A public asset manager. Our current private system channels savings through layers of private asset managers. These asset managers do everything they can to squeeze profits from workers’ investments, resulting in workers losing up to an estimated one-third of their retirement investment returns to fees. Creating a public asset manager option would allow workers to entrust their investments to an entity that does not extract profits from their savings and could drive investment in the public interest—for example, toward green energy production and away from fossil fuels.
  • A public retirement savings plan. A low-fee, portable, publicly backed savings option would give workers a secure and low-cost way to save. The Thrift Savings Plan that federal workers can invest in demonstrates what such an option might look like. Pairing access to such a plan with public matches would further incentivize worker savings.
• Antimonopoly policy: Regulation to protect retirement savings. Too many firms, like Blackstone, see workers’ retirement savings as a new frontier for the private market and are advocating expanding retirement accounts into private equity, private credit, and cryptocurrency markets—seeking to expand financialized investment markets far beyond any possible justified need in service of increased extraction. Policymakers should establish bright-line rules banning any moves that expose workers’ savings to extremely volatile, lightly regulated alternative assets. These proposals would force workers to rely on speculative markets at the very moment when they need stability.

A secure retirement system shouldn’t require workers to time markets or decipher complex financial products. Social Security should remain the anchor. Expanding and fully funding it is the most direct way to ensure a stable, inflation-adjusted income in retirement. Beyond Social Security, complementary systems must correct the flaws of today’s employer-dependent accounts to minimize risk to the fruits of a life’s work.

Paying for care is often not the option families want or need. Whether after the birth of a child or in the face of illness or disability, caregivers often want to be just that—the people providing the care to their loved ones. Yet too few can afford to take the time off from work to do so. To that end, a paid leave program is an essential prerequisite for an agenda that takes families’ need for more time seriously.

The United States is a deep outlier in its lack of such programs. We are one of only seven countries (and the only high-income country) to not guarantee paid maternity leave, one of only a few countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to not guarantee paid paternity leave, and one of only two OECD countries without paid sick leave. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to eligible workers for qualifying family and medical reasons, but the law exempts many workplaces and types of workers, and even eligible workers are unlikely to be able to afford to take unpaid time off. Thirteen states have already recognized this deficiency and moved forward with their own paid leave plans, but that leaves millions of Americans out of any system. Those who do get coverage—largely through employers—tend to be higher-income to begin with; workers in the highest wage deciles are eight times more likely to have access to a paid family leave policy.

Providing truly equitable access to paid leave requires standing up a public option. Fortunately, the experiences of other countries give us a wide evidence base to draw on when structuring such an option. Some clear principles emerge from these studies:

Beyond giving Americans more time, these policies would spur economic growth. One recent, credible analysis estimated that paid leave and universal childcare would “grow economic activity by 4 percent of GDP—then nearly $1 trillion—from 2023 to 2032.”

During the pandemic, the US rapidly stood up a temporary paid sick leave program that mandated two weeks of fully paid sick leave and reimbursed employers for the expense. The program had many flaws that led to both limited coverage and uptake, but it shows that we can implement a real paid leave program quickly. We should draw on this model as we build a permanent paid leave program into our social insurance system.

The US is so far behind peer countries on the basic policies that give people more control over their time that it can be hard to imagine truly transformative policies like a substantially shorter workweek. Nevertheless, especially at a moment of fear about increased productivity from AI leading to job displacement, a shorter workweek should be on the table.

A few policymakers and advocates have already made this case. Senator Bernie Sanders introduced 32-hour workweek legislation in 2024, and the United Auto Workers union included a 32-hour workweek demand in its initial contract negotiations in 2023.

These proposals are backed by real-world experiments. In the last decade and especially since the pandemic, a number of high-profile cities, countries, and companies have adopted shorter workweeks. In Iceland, labor unions have been bargaining for shorter workweeks for the last six years; almost 90 percent of the country now works 36-hour weeks or has the right to do so. Tokyo gave municipal employees a four-day workweek last year. Researchers have also been working with companies to pilot shorter workweek experiments in the UK, the US, Canada, and elsewhere. The results have been promising: Many of the trials found that productivity actually increased for companies after they introduced a four-day workweek; few companies saw significant enough productivity losses to end the trial.

To encourage shorter workweeks, the US should mobilize industrial policies and public options:

• Antimonopsony policy: Overtime protections. The standard workweek is set through overtime rules, so shortening it would mean shifting the point at which overtime kicks in. We should accompany this shift with broadening the coverage of these rules—restoring and extending overtime protections so salaried workers can’t lose time-and-a-half pay through narrow exemptions. Federal regulators must also commit to regularly updating overtime salary thresholds.
• Public options and taxes: Benefits decoupled from employment. Public options are also an important tool in making shorter workweeks a reality. Our tax code encourages an employer-based insurance system that incentivizes employers to limit the number of employees who work over 30 hours and to encourage all those who clear that bar to work even longer hours. Public options that decouple benefits from employment, and accompanying shifts in the tax code, would thus ease the transition to shorter workweeks.

The US hasn’t reduced its formal workweek since 1940. In that time, productivity has risen more than 90 percent. Hourly pay has not kept pace—rising only about 33 percent in the same time period—and time worked has risen. Regardless of AI’s eventual impact on productivity, we are overdue to revisit our standard workweek. And, if AI does lead to rapid increases in productivity, shorter workweeks can help us spread work across more workers and thus may quickly become one of the best tools we have for a fair transition to this new economic era.

Thus far, the proposals in this section have required major changes and investments in the structure of our economy. These are essential to rebuilding a functional, democratic economy that can enable the conditions of a good life for all. That said, structural change can take time. While there is no time to lose in moving these programs forward—and while we believe a committed government could do so swiftly—smaller, faster reforms would also have a big impact on people’s lives and build trust that larger structural changes are on their way. Topping this list of solutions is helping Americans gain control over their work schedules.

The days of finding a job with a consistent and steady schedule no longer exist for millions of workers in the US, particularly those in the service sector. Instead, workers’ schedules span irregular hours and different days from week to week despite businesses themselves being open and operating on a regular schedule. Many companies in the service sector have adopted just-in-time scheduling practices that result in unstable and unpredictable schedules for workers, with significant harmful consequences for their economic and family stability.

According to research by the Shift Project, 60 percent of workers in the service sector report receiving less than two weeks’ notice of their schedule. This makes planning basic life events challenging, including arranging consistent childcare, knowing whether you can attend a parent-teacher conference, or helping take care of an aging parent. Even after workers receive short notice of their schedule, a majority report having to deal with last-minute changes—either getting called in when they weren’t expecting it or a shift they were counting on getting canceled.

Good-life policy tools can tackle this issue:

• Antimonopsony policy: Fair scheduling laws. Today, 10 cities and the state of Oregon have labor-market-shaping laws that generally require companies to provide advance notice to workers of their schedules and compensate employees when their shifts are canceled at the last minute. Congress should pass federal legislation to ensure that, even in industries that have long or irregular hours of work, employees have reasonable notice and certainty of work. Further, Congress should attach fair scheduling requirements to industrial policy investments in private-sector companies.
• Countervailing power: Worker organizing. Workload is a classic topic for labor negotiations. Empowering more workers to organize—whether they’re nurses negotiating staffing ratios or steel workers negotiating 14 days advance notice on scheduling—helps them gain more control over their time.

The impacts of scheduling go far beyond logistical challenges and mental stress for workers. Researchers have also found that just-in-time scheduling has negative consequences on children’s sleep and behavioral problems. These scheduling practices have all but eliminated any line between work and home life, and they’ve unduly shifted businesses’ burdens and risks to workers; 65 percent of workers report that employers require them to keep their schedules “open and available” for work. A good life should ensure that you can step away from work and fully and meaningfully engage in the other aspects of your life, including spending time with family and in your community.

If we’re lucky, we find meaning in the work we do caring for our loved ones and in our paid employment. But even when this is the case, we all want and deserve more time for the other pieces of a rich and textured life. In contrast, none of us find meaning in the time-consuming annoyances of daily life: time on the phone with customer service, time filling out tax returns, time applying for student loans or Medicaid. Giving Americans back time should include tackling these irritants, which add up to something more than irritation. Doing so is another opportunity to build trust in government as it confronts the larger structural challenges that take time out of Americans’ lives.

The Groundwork Collaborative recently released a report coining the term “Annoyance Economy” to describe the hassles that corporations scatter throughout our days. They calculate that these annoyances—from time waiting for the doctor to onslaughts of robocalls—cost Americans “at least $165 billion in wasted time and lost money” each year. This hasn’t always been true, and it’s getting worse as corporations have more freedom to profit from the time taxes they impose on us all. The same Groundwork study reports that time spent on the phone with customer service has risen 60 percent in the last 20 years.

It’s not just private companies that suck time out of Americans’ lives. The federal government itself forces unnecessary paperwork and process on Americans trying to access benefits, from federal student and small business loans to SNAP and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Work requirements like those added to Medicaid eligibility in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act create significant paperwork barriers to access and limit uptake of benefits.

And if that weren’t bad enough on its own, this administrative labyrinth also funnels massive profits to private contractors. Equifax and Deloitte, for example, have gained dominance in income verification and Medicaid eligibility software, respectively, and racked up federal and state government contracts worth billions of dollars. As Luke Farrell, former senior advisor for technology and delivery on the White House Domestic Policy Council, wrote earlier this year, Georgia has spent “twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people” since implementing work requirements for Medicaid in 2020.

Giving back the time stolen by time taxes and the annoyance economy requires creative use of these good-life governance tools:

• Antimonopoly policy: Enforcement against corporate abuses. The Biden administration used its enforcement power to take on corporate abuses. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, targeted junk fees and went after companies with particularly egregious customer service practices. The FTC required companies like Credit Karma to pay money to customers whose time they wasted through deceptive practices—for example, so-called preapproved credit cards people didn’t actually qualify for when they applied. In order to reduce the monopoly power of contractors like Equifax and Deloitte, the federal government should at minimum use its negotiating and enforcement powers to ensure that agencies and states are not getting fleeced and double-charged.
• Public options: Universal and streamlined programs. Lawmakers sometimes weigh down public programs with requirements that make participation difficult at best. Creating the universal public options advocated earlier in this report in ways that minimize requirements for access reduces time taxes significantly. Other public options at the point of service, like the IRS’s Direct File program, offer streamlined ways for Americans to interface with their government, removing middlemen that cost time and money.

When compliance is made easier—for example, when Women, Infants, and Children benefit certification appointments became virtual during COVID—uptake increases. Congress should reduce government time taxes by creating an “affirmative obligation for agencies to maximize uptake of service and benefits, achieving the full legislative intent of programs, including requiring automatic enrollment wherever possible.” Legislation should also facilitate data-sharing across agencies to allow for more automatic enrollment and streamline the process of filling out forms.

Shorter workweeks, fewer irritants, and meaningful care options will give working people time not only to rest but to exercise real agency in other areas of their lives. Some of the freed up hours will go to caring for loved ones, tending to doctor’s appointments, and shopping for groceries, but there will also be more time for going to the movies, taking a hike, joining a club, or running for local office—whatever gives each individual life meaning and a sense of belonging. Giving people that agency requires more than giving them the hours; it also requires building the options.

FDR understood this imperative. He believed the point of an expanded economy was not only more “security and employment” but also “more education,” “more health,” and “more recreation.” To that end, the infrastructure that the New Deal put people to work on included not only power lines and post offices but playgrounds, athletic fields, and national parks. A time agenda should renew a national effort to build this kind of public leisure infrastructure, places where people can cool off or warm up in extreme weather while socializing with their neighbors.

One model worth learning from is Bogotá’s care blocks. Launched in 2020, the Care Block program began with the creation of 10 city-operated blocks across the city where caregivers can access a host of resources all at once. The blocks include buildings that provide care to caregivers’ charges, buildings that offer services to caregivers themselves—from laundry and medical care to legal service and educational courses—and recreational facilities. Importantly, these physical spaces build community for people who often feel isolated. One early study of the program found that it fostered caregivers’ “sense of purpose, enjoyment and resilience.”

Of course, the kind of services that would be included in these physical spaces will vary across countries and communities. But the idea of creating physical spaces that offer care, provide recreational and community infrastructure, and give people more time is inspiring and universally applicable.

Ideally, people would choose to spend some of that time engaging more with their communities and participating in renewed and more efficient democratic processes. As discussed above, a reimagined government needs to engage people differently in policymaking. One reason current processes for community engagement in policymaking often favor elites and the elderly is because those are the people who have the time to voluntarily engage.

Giving people more slack in their schedules is thus a critical first step toward the ultimate democratic goal: policy cocreated by the public. The next steps are building institutions that can efficiently engage everyday people in the policymaking process. That includes the federal government, as explored in Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph’s Building a More Effective, Responsive Government, but also extra-governmental organizations that build countervailing power, like labor and tenants unions.

Good-life governing tools to this end include:

• Public options:
  • Public infrastructure and national service. Those governing for a good life should follow FDR’s lead and build out public pools, libraries, and parks. Further, a robust national service program could put young people to work on these projects, just as the New Deal once did. Such a program would foster national community in and of itself, while building spaces that would do that work into the future.
  • Public infrastructure that saves time. New public facilities should colocate resources in the style of Bogotá’s care blocks. This effort could build on existing public infrastructure like libraries, childcare centers, and even the network of American Job Centers, which could be transformed to connect workers to training, income supports, and organizations that defend workplace rights.
• Countervailing power: Paid civic leave. Policymakers should consider a policy to allow workers to earn paid civic leave from work. One proposal to this end would let workers earn an hour of protected paid time off for a broadly defined set of civic activities for every 80 hours worked. Such a program could close the gap in civic participation between low- and high-earners.