Dear Editor,
For better or worse, the word “affordability” is the new buzzword. It is all over the news and in the public sphere. It was all over the campaign trail and the governor and our Legislature mention it in practically every other sentence. While this is a great thing, something we all should be talking about, and should have been a long time ago, no one has yet said what affordability is and who it is supposed to be for.
We all probably have a general conception of it. As usual, this depends on one’s status within the economic pyramid. What is “affordable” to a millionaire is not “affordable” to a working person at $15 or $20 an hour, with the usual taxes extracted from their paychecks every week, their labor enriching the millionaires and helping to fill the federal and state’s treasury.
So what is “affordability?” Who is it for? Who is eligible for it in our society of “eligibility requirements?” Is it low taxes for the rich while more and more of the taxes necessary to run our state and country get shifted onto the middle and working classes, which has been the trend of our disastrous experiment in neoliberalism?
What do we mean by affordable housing? Affordable health care? We seem to know what is “unaffordable,” for both of these dire necessities, and so many others, but we have never defined what is affordable for them. Who would determine what is affordable and what is not and for whom? Will there be an “affordability” commission to study what is affordable and what is not to make recommendations that may or may not be acted on in the next biennium?
Maybe someday we should at least clarify what we mean by “affordability” and determine who it is intended for before we proclaim it as our new buzzword.
Walter Carpenter, Montpelier
