The $20 burrito is a distraction. The real price problem is the rent, the hospital bill, the daycare bill, and the student loan that keeps a young person trapped in a job. David Marcus, writing in Fox News Opinion, tells Republicans not to panic about the midterms because voters are less angry at the register than they were in 2024. Gas has eased into the “I can live with it” range, he says. The Democratic alternative is worse. Targeted economic relief, including the Trump tax cuts, can salve Gen Z’s grievances. He concedes the pain. He refuses to name the cause. Then he offers a band-aid where the wound needs surgery.
He is right about one thing. Prices did moderate from their 2024 peak, and voters in 2026 are less angry at the register than they were two years ago. Affordability is a gut issue. You watch the total rise, hoping it does not beat your balance. Biden’s mistake was telling a belt-tightening country how good it had things. Marcus is also right that the cost of entering adulthood is higher than it was thirty years ago. No internet bill. No cell phone bill. Rent a fraction of today’s. All true.
Concede that, and move on.
The gas spike eased. The mortgage payment did not. The hospital bill did not. Childcare did not. Those are gut-level costs with no downward arc, and they are the ones eating young adults alive.
Marcus builds his argument around the burrito, the gas pump, and the monthly list of expenses. He is honest about the 1995 budget: rent, a landline, two utility bills, one magazine subscription. Yes, a young adult carries more monthly line items now. But nearly every line is small change next to the rent. The rent did not rise because you pay for a phone.
The building you rent got bought by someone who treats it like a stock. They will never sleep there. They want the return. The investor takes a loan against the building to pay himself. That payment lands on top of the old mortgage, on top of the management fee, on top of the cut the firm skimmed. The cash that used to fix the boiler now goes to the lender.
That is the mechanism. Watch the burrito and you blame the wrong thing.
The war is the same trick one level up. Keep the pump price tolerable, and the bombs stay off the ballot. The rent does not get that courtesy.
Healthcare costs more. Not because of one president. Because the system treats you as the payment terminal. Surprise bills. Out-of-network charges. Pharmacy-benefit-manager fees inserted between you and your prescription. Every other rich country delivers care at a fraction of the cost. The difference is not culture. Here, someone takes a cut at every layer, and you pay.
The hospital bill makes the loan office look like a soup kitchen by comparison.
Childcare costs more. Not because parents have suddenly forgotten how to budget. Because the arithmetic does not close. You cannot make care affordable for parents, decent for workers, and profitable for owners all at once. Pick two. Every other rich country picked the parents and the workers and paid the difference. We picked the spreadsheet. Now a young couple deciding whether to have a child is doing math, not making a choice.
The tax cut does not touch the mortgage payment eating the cash that used to fix the boiler. It does not touch the hospital bill. It does not touch childcare. It does not touch the student debt, which is the leash. The loan payment is why you cannot quit the job, start the company, or move to the town with reasonable rent.
Marcus calls this a price problem.
It is a trap.
I keep being told tax cuts will fix it. It has been my entire lifetime. I am sure it will start any day now.
Then comes the scare. Democrats want to “blow up the system,” Marcus warns, to “start over.” He invokes no Senate, a packed Supreme Court, the end of private health insurance, and Hasan Piker’s “affordability socialism.” The choice, as he frames it, is his tax cut or the abyss.
The catechism of the comfortable, all over again.
But what he calls socialism is, in most cases, just plumbing. A child allowance is a tax credit for families. A public option is a market competitor. A worker co-op is a private business owned by its workers. The credit union in your wallet is a cooperative. The rural electric co-op that wired your town is a cooperative. The public library you borrow from for free is a commons.
None of these requires a revolution. None requires abolishing private property. None requires a Politburo meeting. They are institutions that make ordinary life less ruinous.
We already tested the child allowance. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty by 46 percent, from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent, in a single year. It lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty. Then the expansion lapsed. Child poverty shot back up.
We turned the policy on and poverty fell. We turned it off and poverty returned.
That is not a Scandinavian fairy tale. It is an American, recent, reversible natural experiment. The policy worked. We simply stopped using it.
The choice is not Republicans’ slow, steady progress or Democrats’ plan to blow up the country. That is a false choice. Between the status quo and the revolution sits a wide middle: a child allowance, a public option, a cooperative or community land trust that takes housing off the speculation market, and a wage board that lifts pay across an industry without nationalizing a single firm.
The cost of entry into adulthood is not high because voters have poor messaging discipline. It is high because housing, healthcare, childcare, and education have been structured as profit centers. Lowering that cost is not a communications problem. It is an institution problem.
The public library is already on the corner. The credit union is already in your wallet. The rural electric co-op already wired your town. The child allowance already worked once.
The plumbing is here. It just needs to be used.
That is not socialism. It is a credit union and a child allowance. It already works. It already exists. And it already saved 2.9 million children from poverty before we turned it off.