At a press conference in August 2024, while standing in front of a table stacked with grocery staples, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.”
We’re now officially 100 days into Trump’s second presidency, and not only did the president break that promise, but he is actively pursuing a policy agenda that will make America’s checkout lines wildly more expensive than they already are. Fortunately, the Patriotic Millionaires have a solution to alleviate some of the Trump-induced pressure on people’s wallets—one that will ensure they aren’t taxed into poverty, and that millionaires like us make up the difference on Tax Day.
Inflation and the cost of living were a top concern for voters in the 2024 election, and Trump is well aware of the fact that many voters gave him a second chance in the Oval Office specifically because he vowed to bring down the skyrocketing price of groceries. While it’s reassuring that overall inflation continues to trend downwards, the sad reality is that the price of staples like eggs, chicken, beef, and coffee are continuing to trend upwards these days. The average price of eggs has increased a whopping 26% in just the three months since Trump took office, and now stand at a record high of $6.23 a dozen.
To be fair, this is a continuation of what we saw at the end of Biden’s term. But the policies that Trump is currently pursuing are bound to make prices for groceries and everyday essentials worse, not better. This is especially the case when we examine his tariff scheme. Even with Trump’s 90-day “pause” of reciprocal tariffs on dozens of trading partners, the tariffs currently in effect will cost the typical American household an estimated average of $4,600 annually. To make matters worse, the poor will bear the brunt of the pain: In 2026, the poorest 20% of Americans will pay an average 6.2% of their income in increased taxes from tariffs, while the richest 1% will pay just 1.7% of their income.
It hasn’t taken long for America to catch on to how disastrous Trump’s economic policies are. Nearly 90% of Americans expect tariffs to raise prices and, for the first time in a quarter century, over half of Americans say their personal financial situation is getting worse. It’s no wonder then that Trump eked the lowest 100-day approval rating of any president in the last 80 years.
Trump’s recession-sparking tariffs would be unwelcome at any point in America’s history, but today they are exacerbating the tension between workers’ stagnating wages and the skyrocketing cost of living. Americans are not earning enough money to make ends meet to withstand the economic whiplash from Trump’s policy changes. The numbers and the lived experiences of workers suffering under poverty wages reveal to us that getting ahead in this economy is nearly impossible.
The federal minimum wage has remained a woeful $7.25 an hour since July 2009. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, there is not a single county in the country where this wage is sufficient to support a person with or without a family. It is also worth less today than at any time since 1949, adjusted for inflation.
Let’s look to the state of Idaho as an example to underscore just how inadequate the federal minimum wage is. The MIT Living Wage Calculator rings in the living wage for a single adult with no children in Idaho at $23.18 an hour, which comes to $48,214 annually for a full-time worker. Idaho abides by the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which means that full-time minimum wage workers in the state can expect to earn up to $15,080 a year. This results in a stunning $33,134 shortfall that these workers somehow have to make up for essentials like food, healthcare, housing, transportation, and more.
The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Idaho is $1,353 a month. Minimum wage workers can’t afford a one-year lease. The average price for a used car in Idaho is $37,092. Minimum wage workers can’t afford those car payments. The average annual cost for infant care in Idaho is $9,630. Minimum wage workers can afford that—but only after they work for 33 weeks and if they spend their earnings on nothing else.
Idaho is the median state in the country in terms of the cost of living. Would you like to know how many people in America make less than $23.18 an hour and likely struggle to put food on the table? 57,844,000 workers—which, for anyone wondering, is 40% of the workforce.
That’s right. 40% of the country makes less than the median cost of living for a single adult with no children.
In case that wasn’t enough to convince you that the minimum wage is abominably low, here’s one more thing. The Department of Health and Human Services now lists the poverty line at $15,650 for a one-person household for the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia. This puts a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage, and collecting up to $15,080 a year, below the poverty line. The way that the US calculates the poverty line has its own problems—it’s a multiple of the current cost of the minimum food diet from 1963, which naturally fails to capture a large segment of the population struggling to make ends meet—but it’s still useful to compare it with the minimum wage to drive home just how incredibly inadequate the nation’s wage floor is.
For all these reasons and more, Congress needs to raise the federal minimum wage to a level that people can actually afford to live on. Low-wage workers desperately needed help before Trump came back to the White House, but now they’re in even more dire straits as Trump charges ahead with his tariffs against the advice of economists, policy experts, and business leaders.
Republicans don’t have the greatest track record on the minimum wage, so we won’t hold our breath for them to raise it anytime soon. That’s why the Patriotic Millionaires have our own work-around solution.
Earlier this month, we told you about our new legislative platform, AMERICA 250: The Money Agenda. One of the pieces of legislation included in the platform is the “Cost of Living” Tax Cut Act. It will provide working Americans immediate, meaningful, and permanent tax relief to address the rising cost of living. Specifically, it will institute a Cost of Living Exemption on federal income taxes equal to the median cost of living for a single adult with no children. In so doing, it will ensure that the federal government does not tax its people into poverty (or further into poverty). It’s pretty simple, really: Until someone is able to afford their basic needs, they should not be required to contribute to the federal coffers.
AMERICA 250: The Money Agenda is new, but the Patriotic Millionaires have been calling for something like the Cost of Living Exemption for some time now. Our tax code already recognizes what it really takes to live in America, albeit for delinquent taxpayers and not compliant ones. Specifically, under current IRS rules, delinquent taxpayers are allowed to keep income equal to “basic living expenses,” which are roughly in line with the MIT Living Wage Calculator’s numbers, before they have to pay back taxes. It’s only fair—nay, more than fair—that compliant taxpayers be afforded the same grace that delinquent taxpayers are.
The “Cost of Living” Tax Cut Act will also shift responsibility for any resultant revenue loss from the working class to the millionaire class by instituting surtaxes of 3% on incomes over $1 million and 8% on incomes over $10 million. In a recent interview with TIME Magazine, President Trump said that he “love[s] the concept” of “raising [taxes] on [the] wealthy to take care of [the] middle class” and that he as a rich person would be “honored to pay more.” We couldn’t agree more! That’s why we’d love to see this surtax, similar to what House Democrats passed in 2021, enacted in conjunction with a Cost of Living Exemption.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, and again, and again: We’re not trying to help workers earn more money simply out of the goodness of our hearts. We want them to earn more so that they can buy our products and services and keep the economy, which runs primarily on consumer demand, afloat. Everybody, including rich people like us, goes under when average consumers can’t afford to survive—and this is especially the case when we have a president that is hellbent on self-sabotaging his own country’s economy.
Last week, while speaking to members of the press at the White House, Trump said, “As you know, the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94 percent since we took office. And they’re pretty much normally priced now.” A casual walk down the dairy aisle at any grocery story in America will inevitably prove that to be a lie. (For that to be true, eggs would be selling for about $0.35 a dozen.)
Unlike Trump, we don’t need to lie about what’s going on in America. Patriotism involves taking an honest look at our country, telling the truth about our problems, and doing something to fix them. That’s why we’re telling the truth about the state of the economy and the fact that millions of working people are struggling to get by. And that’s why we’ve gotten our hands dirty and come up with a solution to address it.