About Affordability for America
A project of United for a Guaranteed Income, a 501(c)(4) organization
The crisis
Americans are working full time and still coming up short at the end of the month. Rent, groceries, child care, and health coverage have all outrun pay, so households are deciding between the electric bill and the grocery bill. Affordability is the biggest issue in America right now, and Washington isn’t addressing it with comprehensive solutions.
Prices are only half of it
Affordability is a relationship between two numbers: What life costs and what people have coming in. Almost everyone focused on this problem is working on the first number. Build more housing, permit more power generation, go after the companies setting prices. That work is important, and it’s slow. It moves one sector at a time and never puts a dollar in anyone’s hands.
The other number is income, and more leaders are considering it. A household with more money coming in can absorb the shock of higher prices.
Nearly half of Americans can’t cover their household’s costs.
The threshold prices what a family needs for housing, food, health care, child care, transportation, taxes, student loan payments, and savings, by family size and county. Source: the Urban Institute’s True Cost of Economic Security, 2023.
A guaranteed income is cash that arrives every month with no conditions on how it gets spent. It closes the affordability gap directly. It reaches households instead of market sectors, and people feel it the first month. It’s the answer to the affordability crisis, and it’s the only answer anyone has actually tested.
We know it works
For nearly a decade, more than 250 American cities and counties have run guaranteed income pilots, several of them as randomized controlled trials with a control group drawn from the same pool of applicants. In St. Louis, 95% of participants said the payments made it easier to keep up with rising prices, in a pilot that occurred during the worst inflation in 40 years. In San Diego, employment among people getting the money rose twice as fast as the comparison group, for a 14 point increase. No evaluated pilot in the country has found that guaranteed income causes people to reduce labor force participation.
Make a guaranteed income this country’s answer to the cost of living crisis.
An America where a working household can cover life’s basic costs without falling behind every month.
Get in touch
For questions about guaranteed income or the pilots behind it, write to info@unitedforagi.org.