Yes, you are working harder and yes, you are still falling further behind. Not from any flaw in your work ethic, your faith, or your family budget, but rather from Frankfort’s lack of interest in your financial struggle.
Unless “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” decide to take the sacrosanct duty to vote seriously, and vote for serious representatives who care for their needs, then our elected representatives will continue to serve as rubber stamps for whom they deem worthy: corporate and political heavyweights who have never had to feed a family of five on a working man’s wages.
“Strained living conditions are not inevitable: they are the direct result of public policy,” wrote the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy in December. This is a profound truth. While spring has since bloomed in the Commonwealth, families’ finances are still withering on the vine.
Under current federal and state leadership, those of us born into modest means have been pushed so far from the table of middle-class brotherhood that we tear one another apart over scraps rather than fight the lobbyists’ bootheels holding us down.
Census charts show the average household income of American families rising like the Rockies in satisfying peaks since the 1980s. Yet inflation has flatlined this growth into a slump, leaving more and more middle-class families sliding off the edge.
MIT’s Living Wage Institute recently determined a Kentucky family of four would need to make at least $97,419 annually to afford living in the Commonwealth. This figure represents only the basics - medical costs, housing, taxes, internet, food and childcare. It does not take into consideration the line items that make life actually worth living: family reunions, fishing trips, first birthdays, 50th anniversaries.
According to MIT’s calculations, the same Kentucky family spends about $9,000 a year in health care costs. However, the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed by the president in July, “is expected to leave millions uninsured over the next decade as it reduces federal health spending by nearly $1 trillion, mostly from Medicaid,” reports the non-profit KFF. This seriously jeopardizes the one in three Kentuckians who reportedly rely on Medicaid to afford medical care.
Locally, U.S. census data placed Muhlenberg County family income just shy of $52,000, which is significantly lower than Kentucky’s average of about $63,000, which is in turn significantly lower than the national average of about $80,000. Yet Kentucky’s grocery bills rank fifth highest in the nation when considering percent of income spent at the grocery, as found by WalletHub and reported by The Courier-Journal.
Housing costs in the Commonwealth have risen by more than 30% since 2020, reports the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, matching an increase in energy costs as well.
This stark reality is the crumbling ledge on which many Kentuckians find themselves stranded. Yet when faced with the very real opportunity to throw them a rope, Commonwealth Republicans have instead squandered their tenure in office debating special interests that do little to actually stem the Commonwealth’s affordability crisis.
This month, Senate Bill 9, a housing reform bill addressing Kentucky’s housing shortages, failed to become law when Republican representatives poisoned the proposal with a rider that limited local governments’ ability to regulate short-term rental properties, such as Airbnbs.
But legislators did find time to protect gun manufacturers from civil lawsuits and gift 18 year-olds the right to carry a concealed weapon.
Kentucky mothers can rest easy now knowing that, while they work three jobs and still can’t make rent, their elected officials have placed a teen’s right to bear arms above that same kid’s right to safe, affordable housing.
Such a crisis in affordability is a greater villain among us than many realize. It is not differing ideas that destroy a democracy, but rather the separation of classes into those “deserving” of their daily bread and those doomed to wither in the flames baking it.
This is in stark contrast to what the authors of our Constitution dreamed for their descendants. French philosopher Montesquieu, an 18th century champion of liberty, insisted that “government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another.” His ideas greatly influenced our own young government – the Founding Fathers quoted his principles regularly and relied on his political treatise “The Spirit of Law” as a guide to craft key elements of our government, such as the separation of powers.
“Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go,” Montesquieu warns us. We would do well to heed his advice.
Kentucky legislators who have ignored the affordability crisis on their doorstep have gone home to fiddle while so many families’ Bluegrass dreams turn brown. Voters relegated to the cheap seats would do well to remember this tune when midterms finally call such rubber stamper candidates to the carpet.
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