The American Living Standard

Why an excellent nation must raise the floor, not break the ceiling.

There’s a question I keep coming back to as I write about Stewardship: What does America look like after years of leaders who take the well-being of ordinary people seriously? Not growth curves, record high stock markets, or the billionaire of the week. What does America look like at ground level? Walking down Prospect Rd. in Ashtabula, Ohio, driving down Richmond Hwy in Mount Vernon, Virginia, or waiting at the bus stop on Lake Mead Blvd. in North Las Vegas, Nevada. What can be done for the lives of real people who look at the prices in a grocery store and make decisions?

If we’re honest, we all know something’s off. Wages that don’t stretch. Housing that feels out of reach. Healthcare that feels like a scam. Families forced scramble every month just to keep their heads above water. Meanwhile, the loudest political fights manage to avoid the one thing that should matter most: whether the average American can live a stable, dignified life without being punished for it.

Stewardship takes that challenge head-on by setting a moral baseline for economic policy. And at the center of that baseline is the American Living Standard. A simple yet transformative idea that a nation should be judged not by the triumphs of its most fortunate citizens, but by the security and wellness of its least fortunate ones.

What the American Living Standard Means

The American Living Standard defines a shared national floor beneath every household. Something firmer than rhetoric and more reliable than campaign-season promises. At its core, every American should have:

·         Healthy food, clean water, safe shelter, and modest clothing.

·         Essential healthcare, including mental, dental, and vision care.

·         Access to an essential education and the opportunity to pursue advanced skills.

·         Real opportunities to contribute to the economy and culture of the country.

This isn’t luxury. This isn’t utopian. This is the minimum standard of a nation that values stability, dignity, and contribution.

When people know they can meet their basic needs, everything changes. They think long-term. They invest in their communities. They get healthy. They stay housed. They gain the breathing room to raise children, innovate, and build. A nation that guarantees its people stability is a nation that unleashes its own potential.

How We Build It

The first step is to stop guessing. For too long, major economic metrics have floated above the realities of ordinary Americans. Stewardship flips that. We anchor national metrics – taxation, incentives, wage policies – to median incomes and real local costs, instead of distorted averages, disconnected focus populations, and cherry-picked models.

Every community deserves a clear, updated measure of what it actually takes to live. That means regularly calculating the real costs of housing, food, healthcare, transportation, and education in each locality. Establish an anchor to the reality that Americans live in every day.

From there, policy follows:

·         Local living standards become the basis for wage floors, tax credits, and program design.

·         Housing is treated as a human necessity, not an asset class meant to be strip-mined by corporate landlords and foreign investment funds.

·         Predatory financial practices that only benefit the wealthiest, like borrowing against non-tangible assets to avoid taxes or maintaining perpetual paper debt with lavish lifestyles, are shut down.

·         Essential healthcare access becomes universal, simple, and preventative, rather than expensive, complicated, and reactive.

These are not abstract arguments. They affect real people’s rent, health, income, and daily sense of safety.

Housing: The Backbone of the Living Standard

Any discussion of living standards collapse without stable housing. Stewardship draws a firm line: single-family homes should not be the speculative playground of corporations or entities with no stake in the community. Neighborhood stability requires ownership and stewardship, not extraction.

This doesn’t mean blocking responsible development. It means stopping the kind of predatory landlordship that has turned homes into financial instruments and pushed families out of their own towns. Stable housing is the platform on which food security, health, education, and employment all rest. If we don’t fix this, nothing else holds.

A Nation that Chooses Excellence from the Bottom Up

There’s a myth in American politics and economics that the good life trickles down from the top. If the right people are wealthy enough, the rest of us will eventually benefit. We’ve had decades of proof that this story doesn’t hold.

The truth is simpler and more durable: a nation that ensures its poorest citizens are fed, sheltered, educated, and healthy is a nation that has already chosen to be excellent. It is a nation that refuses to waste human potential. It is a nation that invests in its own stability.

The American Living Standard is not about creating dependency. It’s about clearing the rubble so people can build. It’s about aligning policy with reality, rather than ideology. And most of all, it’s about setting a national expectation that no American should fall beneath a floor of basic dignity. Because the cost of letting people fall is far greater than the cost of lifting them up.

America cannot be excellent if the right to dignity is reserved for the lucky few. But if we build a society where every person stands on solid ground, then what we build on that ground will be stronger for generations to come. Our culture, our innovation, our prosperity.

That is the promise of Stewardship. And that is the promise of the American Living Standard.