A warning for the new Congress: Don’t stop at ‘affordability’
It was easy to see leading up to the election that candidates who recognized these concerns and built agendas around addressing both affordability and economic opportunity would be rewarded at the ballot box.
- And now, the newly elected Congress has only 18 months to demonstrate it understands the difference and begin to deliver on both.
- It was a night of historic wins for the candidates who understood that “affordability” was at the heart of this election.
- Every leader who won in 2026 should take this warning seriously and signal to voters….
As Black business leaders who are experts in navigating and building economic opportunity when the system doesn’t deliver, we had a hunch “affordability” wasn’t telling the whole story.
Now that we can sit with the results of the election, it’s clear that what voters were calling an affordability crisis is also an economic mobility crisis.
- If elected officials fail to create meaningful pathways for far more Americans to get ahead – making sure work pays, wages rise, and wealth can be built – they should not be surprised when voters look elsewhere for answers in 2028 and beyond.
- The good news is that there are solutions that address both sides of the challenge: actions that can help families manage rising costs today while expanding the pathways that help people get ahead over the long term.
- Helping Americans really get ahead will take solutions that make it possible to own a home, finance a business, compete for a contract, and turn a lifetime of work into lasting financial security for their children and grandchildren – in other words, it will take building pathways to work, wages, and wealth.
- Leaders must also expand pathways to work, wages, and wealth by increasing access to homeownership, supporting entrepreneurship and small business growth, expanding opportunities for workers to own a piece of corporate profits, raising wages, and ensuring that economic growth reaches communities too often left behind.
- If leaders do not take immediate steps to address rising costs and make the country’s founding promise of opportunity a reality for more Black Americans, and consequently all Americans, we’ll continue in a downward spiral: lack of faith in economic opportunity causes lack of faith in democracy, which harms the whole economy.
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