Part 15 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This is the final installment.
The last fourteen installments have been an attempt to describe a structural problem. This one is supposed to be the part where the writer describes how to fix it. I want to start by saying clearly that I do not know how to fix it, and that I am suspicious of writers who claim to know. This series has documented a fifty-year political-economic shift that was built by a coalition with vastly more institutional resources, more patience, and more internal coherence than the coalition that would have to reverse it currently has. The honest version of this final installment is mostly an accounting of what has and has not worked at the margins in the last decade, what looks like a realistic reform target on a near-term horizon, and what would have to be true about American politics in twenty or thirty years for the larger structural picture to actually change. None of this is a five-point plan. There is no five-point plan. The pretense that there is one is part of how the current arrangement maintains itself.
What has worked, at the margins
The honest catalog of recent wins, at the level of structural change rather than rhetoric, is shorter than people would like and longer than the cynical version assumes. Five examples, drawn from the last decade, that I think are real and worth understanding for what they show about how change actually accumulates in this system.
The revival of organized labor. The Starbucks workers’ union campaign, which started with a single store in Buffalo in December 2021, had organized roughly 550 to 600 stores and about 11,000 workers as of late 2025. The Amazon Labor Union won the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island in April 2022, the first successful U.S. Amazon union election. The United Auto Workers’ 2023 stand-up strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers produced contracts with substantial wage gains, the elimination of two-tier wage structures at several plants, and the first significant private-sector union contract victory in heavy manufacturing in roughly twenty years. The 2023 Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, jointly lasting about six months, ended with contracts that included previously unprecedented restrictions on the use of generative AI by studios. The honest part of the picture is that none of these has yet produced what would have to come next for the labor revival to actually shift the structural balance — the Starbucks bargaining is stalled, the Amazon Labor Union has not yet expanded beyond JFK8, the UAW contract gains have not propagated to non-union manufacturing in the South. But the elections were real, the workers organized themselves, and the recent NLRB data suggests that election filings have continued at a higher rate than at any point since the 1970s. This is the kind of thing that, sustained over a generation, changes the underlying balance of power. Not over a single election cycle.
State-level wage and leave laws. Roughly thirty states now have minimum wages above the federal $7.25, ranging from modest increases to the $17.50 floor in Washington state. Fourteen states plus the District of Columbia have enacted mandatory paid family-and-medical leave programs, with several more rolling out implementation between now and 2028. State-level pre-K expansion has accelerated. The point is not that state-level wins solve the federal-level structural problem. They don’t. But they have demonstrated that the policy interventions work in the jurisdictions that have tried them, they have built the political constituency for federal versions of the same interventions, and they have established the administrative infrastructure that a federal version would eventually require. The 2009 ACA passed in part because the 2006 Massachusetts version had demonstrated that the architecture was technically and politically workable.
The Biden-era FTC and CFPB. I have referenced both repeatedly in this series. The Khan-era FTC blocked the $24.6 billion Kroger-Albertsons grocery merger in December 2024, opened a substantive antitrust case against Amazon over its platform practices, and successfully challenged the non-compete-clause structures that several million workers were operating under. The Chopra-era CFPB capped credit card late fees, banned medical debt from credit reports, finalized the registry of repeat-offender financial firms, and pursued the major junk-fee restrictions that ultimately moved across two administrations. The honest qualification is that most of these actions have been substantially unwound under the current administration; the credit card late-fee cap was vacated in April 2025, the non-compete ban is stalled in litigation, the medical-debt rule is in administrative limbo. But the legal and administrative work was real, the policy frameworks now exist to be picked up again by a future administration that wants to, and the demonstration that this kind of consumer-protection enforcement is technically achievable in the modern American regulatory state is itself a structural contribution.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act drug-price provisions. The IRA gave Medicare the ability to negotiate prices on an initial list of ten drugs, with more added in subsequent rounds. The number of drugs is small. The implementation timeline is long. The pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying response has been intense. But the negotiation authority is now a permanent feature of the Medicare program, and the pricing precedent matters more than the initial dollar magnitude suggests. The CBO estimates that even the limited drug-price provisions will save Medicare and beneficiaries roughly $100 billion over the first decade. The structural significance is that the U.S. has finally crossed the bright line that the pharmaceutical industry had successfully held since the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, and that subsequent expansions of the negotiation authority will be politically and administratively easier than the initial step was.
The shift in public opinion on labor. Gallup’s annual poll on approval of labor unions has run between 65 and 71 percent for the past four years, the highest sustained level since the mid-1960s. Approval among workers under thirty-five has been higher still. Some of this is recoverable through normal political contestation; the modern Republican party’s working-class realignment has, paradoxically, made organized labor a less reliable partisan signifier than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, which has both costs and opportunities for any labor-revival coalition. The structural point is that the public opinion has now moved consistently in favor of unions for more than a decade, and this is the necessary precondition for any of the federal labor-law reforms (the PRO Act and its successors) that the current institutional landscape has not yet been able to deliver.
What looks realistic in the near term
A short and probably incomplete list of policy targets that I think are politically achievable on a two-to-five-year horizon, in the sense that there is plausibly a sixty-vote Senate coalition for them with the right political conditions, even taking the donor environment as given. These are not radical structural reforms; they are the things that the existing political-economic system can plausibly deliver if pushed.
Federal paid family-and-medical leave, modeled on the strongest state versions. Federal minimum-wage increase to somewhere in the $12 to $15 range, with regional adjustments. Restoration of the credit card late-fee cap, the medical-debt-credit-reporting rule, the FTC non-compete ban, and the other regulatory frameworks that were built in 2021-2024 and dismantled after January 2025. Expansion of the Medicare drug-price-negotiation list. Reinstatement of the expanded Child Tax Credit, which during its brief 2021 existence cut child poverty by roughly forty percent. Modest expansion of antitrust enforcement at the FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division. Resolution of the student-loan repayment regime through stable income-contingent payment caps. None of these would change the structural picture this series has been documenting. All of them would meaningfully improve the financial circumstances of tens of millions of households, and the cumulative effect over a decade would matter. They are also each politically vulnerable to the next change of administration, which is the nature of policy in the current American political environment.
The deeper structural reforms — Medicare for All, universal pre-K, public option for higher-education finance, federal labor-law reform that would change the underlying organizing rules, campaign finance reform that would address the corporate-funding architecture this series has been describing — are on a different horizon entirely. They would require a political coalition with stable congressional supermajorities, a friendly judiciary, and a sustained organizing base that can resist the corporate counter-mobilization that any of them would provoke. That coalition does not currently exist. Whether it can be built is the question that every recent generation of American progressive politics has tried to answer, with mixed results.
The asymmetry, again
The corporate political coalition that produced the system this series has been documenting spent fifty years building the institutional infrastructure that has sustained it. It funded the think tanks, endowed the academic positions, recruited the legal scholars, developed the litigation strategies, built the media outlets, ran the long-game political-recruitment programs that have produced the Federalist Society pipeline, and patiently moved the policy environment in the direction it wanted across both political parties’ administrations.
The opposing coalition — organized labor, consumer advocacy, the more egalitarian wing of the Democratic Party, the progressive think-tank infrastructure that has tried to function as the leftward counterpart to the Heritage-AEI-Cato-Federalist complex — has nothing comparable in resources or institutional depth. The Economic Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, the Roosevelt Institute, the various labor research arms, the small set of progressive law schools and clinics, are doing real work and would do more with more resources. They are also operating against a corporate infrastructure that outspends them by something like a hundred to one on the legal and policy-development side of the fight, before you count the lobbying differential.
The institutional asymmetry is the part of the picture that any honest analysis of the next thirty years has to start with. It is not impossible to close, and the historical record of the New Deal and the early postwar period shows that something like the necessary institutional density can be assembled when the political conditions are favorable. The political conditions are not currently favorable. They could become more favorable. The question of how to make them more favorable is the political-strategy question that everyone in this conversation is trying to answer, and that I am not in a position to answer from where I sit.
Where I sit
I have spent twenty-five years working in corporate media. I now run a small business out of the Hudson Valley. I am the kind of person who reads economic-policy reports for recreation, who has opinions about the structural dynamics described in this series, and who, despite all of that, does not have any particular standing or expertise to direct other people’s political organizing. I have written this series because the cost-shifting picture is something I have watched happen to my own household and the households of nearly everyone I know across roughly thirty years of working life, and because the dominant explanations of why it has happened have struck me as inadequate or actively misleading. I think the description in installments one through fourteen is approximately correct as a description.
I am also genuinely uncertain about the prescription. The honest answer is that the political work this kind of reform would require has to be done by people doing the organizing rather than by writers describing the problem from the outside. The labor organizers building union elections one workplace at a time, the state legislators pushing minimum-wage and paid-leave bills against the resistance of state chambers of commerce, the antitrust lawyers building case files against industries that have not been seriously challenged in forty years, the federal-agency staff developing rule-making frameworks that may get vacated by the next administration and then revived by the one after that — those are the people who actually have to do the work, and the work is mostly slow and mostly invisible and mostly does not produce the dramatic public moments that movement journalism is built around. The political theory of how it eventually adds up to something is not something I can tell anyone with confidence.
What I can say is that the patient version of the work appears to be producing results at a faster rate than it has in any of the previous five decades. The labor revival is real. The state-level policy infrastructure has been substantially built out in the last fifteen years. The federal regulatory framework, even partially dismantled, exists in a more usable form than at any prior point in this century. The public-opinion environment is more favorable to structural reform than at any point since roughly 1970. None of these facts guarantees that the next twenty years produce a different outcome than the last fifty. They are necessary but not sufficient. The sufficient conditions are political and require the kind of long, slow, multi-generational coalition work that there is no shortcut to.
This series has been an attempt to describe a problem rather than to prescribe a solution. I think the description matters because the prevailing alternative descriptions of why American households are stuck — personal-responsibility narratives, generational-blame narratives, lifestyle-spending narratives, the entire genre of explanations that locate the cause in the choices of the people experiencing the problem rather than in the structural environment within which they are operating — are wrong in ways that prevent honest political analysis. If this series has done its job, the readers who got through fifteen installments now have at least a defensible vocabulary for talking about what has happened to American working households over the last fifty years and why. What they do with that vocabulary is up to them. I have a working hypothesis that, eventually, enough people in enough places doing enough small things in enough patient ways produce a structural shift large enough to be visible from a distance. The corporate side proved this is possible from their side of the fight. The other side has not yet, in our lifetimes, proven the reverse. Whether it can be done is the open political question of the next thirty years. I am not optimistic enough to say it will be. I am not cynical enough to say it cannot.
Thank you for reading.
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