Breathing Room for All: Tackling the Cost-of-Living Crisis with Progressive Policy Solutions

The post-pandemic economy has been marked by rapid economic growth and job gains but marred by significant increases in the cost of basic necessities, including groceries, rent, and utilities. While wages for some workers have outpaced inflation, people are understandably frustrated by how much more expensive everything is, remembering sticker prices that were 25, 50 percent lower not that long ago. For millions of American families, the cost of just trying to get by feels punishingly unfair, and getting ahead feels completely out of reach.

Groceries, for example, are one of the most salient, regular, and universal expenses. Supply chain disruptions fueled considerable price increases over the past few years, and they continue to cause acute shortages and price spikes—as anyone who has cooked an omelet lately well knows.¹ Further, housing affordability has reached crisis levels, with rents surging and homeownership slipping further out of reach for ordinary Americans as mortgage rates stay elevated and housing supply remains constrained.² Beyond the essentials, basic recreational and leisure activities have become prohibitively expensive, particularly for families. A family outing to a baseball game, a classic American pastime, now costs nearly $150.³ Watching television is increasingly difficult without juggling multiple streaming subscriptions (on top of paying for internet access), each of which has hiked prices while fragmenting access.⁴ From the checkout aisle to the box office, American consumers are nickel-and-dimed by a system that has few checks on increasingly consolidated corporate power.

While consumers feel squeezed at nearly every turn, corporations boast skyrocketing profits, shareholder payouts, and executive compensation packages. Nearly every day, there’s a headline boasting a new innovative tactic corporations have unveiled to rip customers off, and they can’t wait to find out how to use artificial intelligence to improve them. Fast-food companies are using “surge pricing” to charge you more for a coffee during morning rush hour.⁵ Grocery stores are using surveillance pricing to charge more for your favorite cereal brand, knowing you’ll pay the extra dollar.⁶ Car manufacturers are making you pay a monthly subscription for the heated seats in your car.⁷ Landlords and meatpackers are using algorithms to price fix, hiking rents and grocery prices and reducing housing and food supply.⁸ When they’re not exploiting technological advancements, corporations are taking advantage of crises, jacking prices up well beyond what’s necessary or warranted when given the opportunity.⁹ Or, worse, they’re buying up their competition or suppliers so that they can exploit their market power to charge exorbitant prices because consumers have no choice but to pay up.¹⁰ 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Policymakers can and should take affirmative steps to rein in runaway costs, address corporate profiteering, and restore a sense of fairness to the economy. Our existing consumer protection statutes and institutions should be strengthened, not ransacked.¹¹ Novel policies can confront affordability, corporate overreach, and just plain annoyances to improve consumers’ lives.

For example, while in response to the latest wave of inflation the US focused its efforts on increasing food assistance benefits to counteract the rise in grocery prices, these programs only reach some consumers.¹² Mexico, on the other hand, took proactive steps to address grocery prices by negotiating directly with producers and distributors to keep basic food items affordable for all.¹³ The government limits the cost of the canasta básica, a basket of 24 basic food items that meet a household’s nutritional needs, to around $45 (a decline of more than 12 percent between 2023 and 2024).¹⁴ American policymakers could implement something similar by working with farmers, grocers, and suppliers to cap the cost of the cheapest basket of groceries that meets families’ nutritional needs (which is already established under the US Department of Agriculture’s Thrifty Food Plan) to ensure that essential food staples remain accessible at fair prices. This could be done through Defense Production Act Title VII voluntary agreements, which were used to coordinate COVID-19 response with the health-care industry.¹⁵ Direct intervention in food pricing, combined with strong antitrust enforcement against corporate grocery chains engaging in unfair or anticompetitive pricing, would provide immediate relief for millions of Americans struggling with high grocery bills.

For another example, public funds help finance stadiums and airports, yet captive consumers are forced to pay egregious prices for food, drinks, and parking at these venues.¹⁶ If taxpayer dollars are subsidizing these facilities, policymakers should mandate that consumers pay reasonable prices inside them, as we recently laid out in a policy brief.¹⁷ A bottle of water or a hot dog should not cost triple the price of the convenience store down the street just because someone is at a ballpark or an airport. For example, the Port Authority of New York caps concession prices to 10 percent above street prices at Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia airports, and the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta charges just $2 for hot dogs and sodas, a price set based on the market rate near the stadium.¹⁸ Implementing fair pricing rules in publicly subsidized spaces reduces unnecessary financial burdens on consumers and reduces corporate profiteering enabled by public funding.

Beyond rising sticker prices, companies are continuously trying to pull a fast one on consumers by tacking on hidden or unavoidable charges at the last minute. From airline baggage fees to service fees for concert tickets, overdraft charges, and Waffle House egg surcharges, it’s impossible for consumers to trust that the price they see is what they’ll pay.¹⁹ The Biden administration took aim at many of these “junk fees,” though the Trump administration has rolled back the progress made. Policymakers should use existing authorities that prohibit unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (UDAAPs) to aggressively curtail profiteering and plain old shakedowns.²⁰ 

These policy solutions go beyond fairness or even affordability—they are about restoring trust in governance and ensuring that Americans feel supported, not exploited, by the economy and their government. Too often, consumers feel like they get the rug pulled out from under them at every point of sale while their elected officials sit idly by or, worse, loosen restrictions on and give taxpayer-funded handouts to the perpetrators. It, understandably, erodes their faith in the very institutions erected to support them. Addressing the cost-of-living crisis is not just an economic issue—it’s a democratic imperative.

The progressive vision for governance must center on making life more affordable and predictable for working families. Policymakers should be champions for policies that put people before profits, ensuring that corporations cannot continue squeezing consumers with reckless abandon. By championing bold, proactive, and simple consumer- and family-first policies, progressives can show that the government works in the interests of ordinary people, not just corporate giants.