We Can't Afford That
When I was a college professor I showed the documentary Food, Inc. to students as part of a visual argument assignment. We watched it over several days and afterward held discussions to analyze the themes, but mostly I remember two little girls in a grocery store. The younger girl, perhaps 5 or 6, wants fruit—pears, I think. Her sister, a few years older, tells her the family can’t afford fruit. She computes the price per pear in her head, and tells her sister it would not be cost effective.
The younger girl, about the same age then as my younger daughter was, puts the pears back. I won’t describe the sad look on her face as she does, but if you’ve been a father unable to provide what his little girl needs, you’ve seen it, and it has cut you.
Speaking of cutting, I have a cancer scan this week. I’ve already received the bill. I won’t tell you how much it is yet, but in 1990, the year I started college, I could have paid two years of college tuition with that much money.
And still had a little left over for pears.
In a recent town hall, U.S. Representative Mike Flood, a Republican from Nebraska, told Lincoln residents that the United States simply can’t afford Medicare for All.
Townsperson: Why did you vote to cut SNAP and Healthcare?
Flood: We do not have unlimited money in the United States.
Townsperson: Would you support rolling back the age of Medicare For All in 5-year increments until everyone is covered?
Flood: We can’t afford that.
Crowd: booooooooooooo!
But here’s what we can afford, according to Google’s all-seeing plagiarism bot:
a record $1.5 trillion in more war dollars, and here I feel the need to point out we already spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined
cuts to the National Institutes of Health and community development block grants
permanent cuts to Medicaid and food stamps
tax cuts for the rich that increase our national debt
The hypocrisy goes further, too. From USA Today:
In the early hours of June 5, Senate Republicans passed a bill that would allocate $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown. Only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, opposed the bill.
In the process, Republicans failed to ban Trump’s $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund or keep the president from building his lavish White House ballroom. They also rejected two amendments from Democrats that would have tackled affordable housing. So when you can’t afford to buy a home, remember that it was all to serve a greater good – making life miserable for immigrants during the rest of Trump’s second term and ensuring the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters get away with all of it.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer summed it up surprisingly well in remarks on the Senate floor.
“Apparently, Republicans think we cannot afford a single penny to help Americans cover the skyrocketing cost of gasoline, of health care, of housing, of food, of energy – you name it – but somehow we can afford to give another $70 billion to Trump’s rogue agencies even though ICE and Border Patrol already have a hundred billion dollars in cash on hand,” Schumer said.
This is the hypocrisy of the Republican Party. Everything is too expensive until Trump boldly declares that he wants his every whim to be fully funded by taxpayer dollars. The everyday needs of working-class Americans – the very people who voted for congressional Republicans – do not matter.
There are now a number of “trackers” to track how much money the Trump family has made since his 2024 re-election.
This one shows the money they’ve received from crypto:
“...in the nearly one year since Trump was reelected president, Trump and his family have amassed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts from leveraging the presidency for personal gain, including over $1.2 billion in crypto gains alone.”
This one highlights the money the Trump family has received from foreign officials and dignitaries:
“While Trump and his family are using the White House to make billions, we are tracking every cent. As of January 2026, our Committee’s analysis shows that these schemes have contributed to an estimated $2.25 billion in realized profits for Trump from foreign payments, corrupt oligarchs, and others. This total rises to as much as $9.7 billion when the value of Trump’s digital assets is factored in, with as much as $600 million coming from foreign interests. President Trump should be serving the American people—not his own pockets.”
This one shows how much money the Trump family has made renting Trump properties out to PACs:
While the Trump family is getting richer, healthcare is getting harder and harder to afford. Same with gas or groceries. In some states kids don’t eat at school if they don’t have any money and I’m going to need someone to explain to me, using very small words, what kind of society won’t pay for its kids to eat.
We can’t afford to help the working poor either. These are people who work for Wal-mart or McDonald’s but are deliberatley kept as part-time so their employer won’t have to pay benefits, forcing the workers to rely on government assistance in the form of SNAP. In this country, instead of forcing the company to pay a living wage, we blame the worker. We call them lazy, unskilled labor, and look down on them for not working harder to find a better job.
Meanwhile, the CEOs of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s make $20 million a year. According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay rose roughly 1000% from 1978 to 2024, while worker pay rose about 26%. In 1965, CEOs made 21 times what workers did—now they make 281 times more.
That’s a lot of pears.
Apparently we can also afford all the grift. All the billionaire “donations” for a bloated ballroom. The fucked-up Reflection Pool repairs. The White House uglification project only a tacky asshole would think looks good. The giant militarized dancehall with the drone-deploying roof, whatever that is. We can afford the endless and expensive golf trips. We can allow him to charge the Secret Service to stay in his own hotels. To charge foreign dignitaries to stay in his hotels. We can afford for his hyena-faced kids to get sweetheart deals with foreign countries and for his jackal-hearted friends to get no-bid contracts to fix the Reflecting Pool.
We can afford for CEO pay to so far outpace their workers the government has to pay the workers. We can afford for Wal-Mart and McDonald’s to make billions every year while their workers are scrambling to make ends meet. While their healthcare bills keep mounting. While their rent keeps going up.
While we the people pay more and more for everything, and get less and less in return.
When you grow up working class in America you learn early on what “we can’t afford that” means. It doesn’t always mean you can’t afford the thing. You already know you can’t afford new cars and far-flung vacations for sure—those things are so far out of reach you forget about them.
What “we can’t afford that” really means for most lower and lower-middle class families is that on a daily basis there are other, more important things you need first. Your child cannot have a toy because you need heat in the house. You cannot send your child to camp because you have to put gas in the car to get to the job you can’t quit.
Your child cannot have pears because personal luxuries such as fruit are unaffordable.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
From the great Heather Cox Richardson:
“While Hegseth told Congress the [Iran] war has cost $37.5 billion so far, Gordon Lubold, Mosheh Gains, and Courtney Kube of NBC News reported on July 14 that the internal Pentagon estimate of the cost is about $100 billion. Walker notes that when economists at Moody’s added higher gas prices to the cost of the war, they estimated that it has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.”
It has cost the America people far more than that. Billion of dollars. Houses and healthcare and hungry children. The detritus of war strewn once again across the land as the shadow appears over the mantle and we paint blood on the door. As the profits printed on Wall Street disappear in the unaffordable tenements. While the machines of destruction rise and the hope of the congregation falls. While the waves of despair roll like amber waves of grain. Where the darkness that has descended upon us all buries our ancient dream of light, the hope for a better future in the face of the unforgivable past.
While we fear the broken trust of our government, who place more importance on bombing the people of other countries than helping the people in this one.
They’re selling our national parks, too. Guess we can’t afford those either.
My health insurance costs $1200 a month. Because I’ve had cancer twice, I have a yearly cancer scan that costs $8000, or about 8 semesters of 1990 college tuition at a small state school. My deductible is $8000 also, which means I’ll pay $20,000 this year for healthcare. I get a reimbursement from my job, which brings the total down to about $10,000 a year.
I have around 12-14 years until retirement age. Some quick math shows that $10,000 a year invested in the stock market for 12 years at an 10% growth rate, which is around average for an S&P 500 fund to achieve, would be worth $250,000 by the time I retire.
So, instead of retiring with a quarter million, I’ll continue paying $10,000 a year just to check if the cancer has come back. If it does come back I’ll pay far more than $10,000 a year for treatment (don’t ask me how much my two surgeries cost).
I guess this is the part where I am supposed to say I’m just grateful to be alive.
After the grocery store the little girl’s family went through the drive-thru at Burger King because it was a more cost-effective way to feed them. They didn’t have healthcare. They lived in a rented room. Not house. A room, for 4 or 5 people. A TV and two beds, one tiny bathroom. They were Mexicans who had come here legally to try to build a better life, that ancient and elusive American dream. They were hard workers. Salt of the earth.
The kind of people we claim to welcome.
Every city I’ve ever been in I’ve seen people sleeping on the sidewalks. Washed up in the alleys, cardboard-boxing along the railroad tracks. In my small hometown there are houses that look like they’ve been bombed, with their crumbling walls and caved-in roofs. Their peeling tarpaper, the windows with dark stars punched into them and old rusted hunkers out front, bought in a time when our hopes for the future were still as shiny and new as the car once was.
In the town itself the empty husks of old industries. Abandoned storefronts, a burned-down pizza place. Long lines for free food and disbelief at how high everything is. How unbelievably high. The elementary where I learned that America is the greatest country in the world is now gone, and in its place a new structure, where the teachers repeat the same old meaningless words while the town crumbles around them and everyone—Republican and Democrat, Catholic and Protestant—shakes their head sadly when discussing the direction our country is headed.
We’ve been in one war or another since 2001. That’s 25 years with only a few small windows when we weren’t raining destruction down on the small people of some small country. Launching missiles from battleships, dropping bombs from autonomous drones. Our aircraft carriers circling the world like our satellites, armed with Tomahawk missiles, a name we think sounds fierce. For freedom, we say, when the missiles fly, but tell me how I’m more free now than I was in 2001. I’ll wait.
While I’m waiting, one final word: there hasn’t been a single time in the last 25 years we’ve been unable to afford a war.
If you’re keeping score, the way it works is that you don’t get pears. You get shitty fast-food burgers if you are poor in this country. You don’t get healthcare unless you can afford it, and you can’t afford it working for minimum wage. You can’t buy a home because we’ve allowed private investment groups to snatch up all the houses so you’re left renting, never able to gain any equity.
In this country we do not prioritize the health or happiness of the American people. We prioritize money. This is a deliberate choice by our elected officials, and while I want to place all the blame on Republicans, for far too long Democrats have been complicit, allowing tax cuts for the rich so the rich can have more riches.
And for you: no pears. No happiness for two little girls in a grocery store. Don’t even ask. We need more money for the military. More money for the billionaires. More missiles and bullets and bombs. More drones, more defense, a bigger budget, more tax cuts for the richest people on the face of the planet, while somewhere a little girl goes to sleep dreaming of one day being able to eat a piece of fruit without having to calculate its cost.
This was so powerful. Thank you.
And sincere best wishes for your prognosis.
I keep thinking, "If it gets bad enough, Americans will wake up!" Actually, I should say I keep *hoping* that, because what I keep thinking is that Americans will only wake up when we are plummeting over the cliff with nothing but air between us and the rocks below. Will this be the year that Americans stop accepting this charade? I keep hoping.