FROM THE PRESIDENT AND CEO
DECEMBER 2025
A lot needs to change in America—and recent years have tested our collective efforts to advance economic justice. Households are navigating mounting pressures, and the systems meant to support broad prosperity are strained.
Still, even in this environment, practical change efforts in communities across the country are showing that better outcomes are possible. These early shifts matter because they point to what a more secure and inclusive economy can look like.
Our fight for economic justice will face its toughest battles over the next decade.
Affordability, inflation, tariffs, increasing debt, high interest rates, asset risk, uncertain and volatile trade policies, redistricting, injunctions, ICE, and AI in the workforce crowd our headlines and policy discussions. Increasingly, these systemic forces determine whether one is included or excluded socially, politically or economically. They are deeply intertwined and adversely affect LMI households. Households across the nation are feeling profoundly insecure as uncertainty and rising prices push them to take on more debt and draw down assets meant for the future.
We also know how we got here. Since the 1980s, a worker’s pay and household prosperity have become divorced from productivity increases. Profits became the payoff for shareholders, making wealthy investors wealthier. Unlike the heyday of middle-class growth in the U.S., nor the current policies in several thriving Western European countries, the social contract and consumer protections designed to benefit most workers were dismantled, needed changes were ignored, and predation left unchecked.
Predictably, households faced incomes with less purchasing power, paving the way for greater debt and, ultimately, refinancing and reductions in their assets. Indeed, the current tax burden to finance the government exacerbates this reality as it is disproportionately paid by middle- and lower-income wage earners.
Over this period of multiple decades, government tax policies and collection approaches, public expenditures, inflation, waning environmental commitments, and insufficient consumer protections have had a relentless upside-down economic impact on most households. It is fair to say that we have lived through two generations of systemically wrong economic results for most households.
Yet within these systems, several positive reforms and new designs give hope.
More households now have a share of ownership than ever before – as homeowners, small business owners, and in retirement funds. That growth is an important foundation for prosperity; we need to move the system to make it easier for most households to grow their wealth. Thus, it is promising that Guaranteed Income pilots are moving the narrative and policy with evidence. Three states have already adopted Baby Bonds, with more to follow. Increased state public investment in post-secondary education is happening in many states with a focus on completion with little or no debt. Philanthropic and financial institution interventions are making homeownership more inclusive and affordable in their communities.
These and other interventions matter, as they are the seedlings informing future reform.
At AFN, we believe that the economy of the wealthiest country can support its populations to realize shared economic security and prosperity. We understand this is only achieved through targeted universalism frameworks. The distribution of wealth needs to be rebalanced, if we are to provide economic security for the retirees, those with disabilities, displaced workers and youth trying to enter the workforce. It will take reconsidering and reinventing policies that have been in place for decades and developing meaningful investments and economic supports to address the current challenging economy.
To realize a just and widely shared economy, the solutions are not in the past, but in our future. In the face of current disruptions, we will all need to commit to relentlessly pursuing tested solutions and significant systemic reinventions that increase economic security even during disruptions, foment investment and meaningful asset growth, provide home security, and increase health outcomes and multigenerational security.
My wish for all of us is that we courageously move into the new year with the resolve to foster a truly inclusive economic prosperity—embracing the changes, protections, and innovations needed to create a system that produces more economic security as a foundation and expands the pathways to shared wealth and sustained, inclusive prosperity.
I believe AFN will continue to be a catalyst, and I hope to hear from all of our members in the new year as we share the best ideas and approaches to realizing the systemic changes needed ahead.
