In the 9th District and across the country, the cost of basic necessities is skyrocketing. Rent and home prices feel increasingly out of reach, especially for younger people. Child care costs more than a second mortgage. Health care premiums, deductibles, and prescription drug prices continue to climb. Utility bills continue to rise, and the spread of new data centers threaten to push prices even higher. But wages haven’t kept pace, and more families are being forced to choose between essentials like food, care, and medicine.

When people can’t afford the basics, it holds the entire economy back. Parents leave the workforce because child care is too expensive. Seniors skip medication to pay the rent. Families are priced out of the neighborhoods they’ve lived in for generations.

This isn’t just an affordability issue – it’s about who gets to live with dignity and stability, and who gets pushed to the margins. This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, there is simply no reason why everyone shouldn’t be able to afford basic necessities and more.

We must lower housing and child care costs, take on price gougers, and incentivize more development, especially near transit. It's past time we had a national single-payer health system such as Medicare for All providing universal coverage for all.

I’ll fight for policies that bring down the cost of essentials and make sure working people can build a secure life, including:

Lower Housing Costs for All 

• Incentivizing New Development: If we want to lower housing costs, we need to build more homes. The federal government can and should work to remove barriers to building, incentivize construction, and bring down the cost of buying and owning a home.

• Investing in Building Housing We Can Afford: Dramatically increase federal investment in building and preserving affordable housing through the Housing Trust Fund and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.

• Ending Corporate Price-Gouging: Crack down on Wall Street landlords and private equity firms that artificially inflate rent and exploit housing shortages, including by banning the use of algorithms to set rent and by penalizing hedge funds and private equity firms that buy up single family homes.

• Supporting Renters and First-Time Buyers: Expand rental assistance and provide down-payment support for families shut out of homeownership.

• Prioritizing Federal Transportation & Infrastructure Funding for Pro-Housing Municipalities: Reward pro-housing zoning policies (like legalizing apartments near transit and lowering parking minimums) as a condition of receiving federal transportation grants. 

• Reducing Administrative Burdens of Federal Programs: Streamline application and compliance processes, allow more flexible use of funds, and allow tax credits to pair more easily with other financing sources for federally supported housing initiatives.

Universal, Affordable Child Care

• Capping Child Care Costs: Child care shouldn’t break the bank.  I’ll fight for legislation to make sure no family spends more than 7% of their income on child care.

• Increasing the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for Inflation: The CDCTC, which tops out at just $3,000 for one child and $6,000 for two or more children, hasn’t been meaningfully changed in two decades, even as child care costs have exploded. By increasing the CDCTC significantly and making it fully refundable — a successful but temporary pandemic relief measure — we can immediately help families struggling to pay child care costs. 

• Boosting the Child Care Workforce: Invest in higher wages, training, and benefits for early childhood educators to improve quality and expand capacity.

• Building a Public Child Care System: Create a nationwide network of high-quality, affordable child care centers — especially in underserved areas.

Provide Universal Coverage Through Medicare for All

• Creating a Medicare for All system: The health insurance system in our country is a mess. It’s expensive, impossible to navigate, and doesn’t lead to better health outcomes. We need to pass Medicare for All and deliver the affordable health care people enjoy in nearly every other advanced democracy.

• Rolling back Trump’s Medicaid cuts: The Republican budget makes deep cuts to Medicaid, ACA premium support, and hospitals across the country. Step one will be reversing these damaging policies immediately so working people can access care and hospitals can avoid closure. 

• Capping Prescription Drug Prices: Expand Medicare’s power to negotiate drug prices and stop big pharma from price-gouging patients for life saving medicine, including expanding the IRA’s caps on out of pocket costs to private insurance.

• Ending Surprise Medical Bills: Strengthen laws to protect consumers from unexpected out-of-network charges and junk insurance plans.

We must build an economy where people don’t have to scrape by just to keep a roof over their heads, send their kids to daycare, or fill a prescription. In Congress, I’ll work every day to bring down costs, raise wages, and make life affordable for everyone — not just those at the very top.