将近一年前，在共和党在一系列州和地方选举中失利后，唐纳德·特朗普对选举后分析一致认为是其阵营失败的主要原因的问题，表达了迟来的认识。“你知道他们有个新词叫‘可负担性’，而且他们谈论得不够多，”特朗普总统在选举日次日早上对福克斯新闻说。
Nearly one year ago, after Republicans were rejected in a series of state and local elections, Donald Trump expressed a belated recognition of the issue that postmortems were united in describing as the primary cause of his side’s defeats. “You know they have this new word called affordability, and they don’t talk about it enough,” the president told Fox News the morning after Election Day.
反对者和评论员嘲笑特朗普的词汇发现，指出词典条目显示该词的使用可追溯至1647年。但从广义上说，他是正确的。“可负担性”一词几乎不是20世纪的词汇：谷歌的Ngram显示，该词在书籍中开始出现于1973年，当时另一场全球石油危机引发了一波通货膨胀，并且在1980年之前从未出现在任何政党纲领中。在随后的几年中，该词在政治语言中的出现——通过“可负担住房”和《平价医疗法案》等术语——暗示了一个优先考虑人类基本生活成本的政策项目。
Opponents and commentatorsmocked Trump’s lexicographical discovery, pointing todictionary entries that trace use of to 1647. But he was, broadly, correct. as a term was hardly part of the 20th century vocabulary: Google’s Ngram shows the word emerging in books beginning in 1973, just as another global oil crisis inspired a wave of inflation, andnever appeared in a party platform before 1980. Its emergence across political language in the subsequent years — through terms like “affordable housing” and the Affordable Care Act — gestured at a policy project that prioritized the cost of human basics. (Politicians could have just as easily promised more housing or better-quality medical care, after all.)
毕竟，政客们本可以同样轻易地承诺更多住房或更高质量的医疗服务。如今，“可负担性”已无法回避，它是新冠疫情期间改造家居时以折扣价购买的家具，仍卡在美国政治的客厅里，太大了，无法从进来的路出去。一切都在变贵，而且越来越贵。像特朗普这样试图回避这一概念的官员和候选人，正面临着必须与之接触的压力——无论是作为议程设置的优先事项、共情的标志，还是将旧议题洗白为新时机的修辞手段。
Now is unavoidable, furniture acquired at a discount during a Covid-era redesign that remains stuck in the living room of American politics, too big to exit the way it came in. Everything is expensive, and always more so. Officeholders and candidates like Trump who tried to avoid it are under pressure to engage with the concept — whether as an agenda-setting priority, a marker of empathy or a rhetorical device to launder old causes into the new moment.
2026年选举周期标志着我们以消费者为中心的新时代的成熟，它不再是疫情导致价格冲击的烦人遗留问题，而是一个永久性议题。2008年全球金融危机的直接后果使选民首先把自己视为房主、投资者、储蓄者和纳税人。到2015年，当特朗普和伯尼·桑德斯成为总统候选人时，他们重新引导选民转向以工资劳动者为中心的思维模式，即在工业转型和国际竞争中努力保住工作。如今，几乎所有政策讨论——包括能源、医疗、教育、住房和农业——首先都通过消费者的经验来过滤。
The 2026 election cycle marks the maturation of our new -centered era, no longer a nagging artifact of the pandemic price shock but a permanent issue. The immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis made voters think of themselves foremost as homeowners, investors, savers and taxpayers. By 2015, when Trump and Bernie Sanders emerged as presidential contenders, they reoriented voters toward the mindset of the wage-earning laborer, struggling to keep one’s job amid industrial transformation and international competition. Now just about every policy conversation — including those over energy, health care, education, housing and agriculture — is filtered first through the experience of the consumer.
对此痴迷的批评者认为，可负担性正在推开衡量经济实力的其他方式。保守派智库美国指南针（American Compass）的创始人奥伦·卡斯（Oren Cass）认为，把美国人首先视为消费者未能尊重他们作为劳动者的身份。反垄断斗士莉娜·汗（Lina Khan），如今是纽约市长扎赫兰·曼丹尼（Zohran Mamdani）的顾问——或许正是可负担性时代典型的美国政治家——她一直主张采取更广阔的市场视角。
There are critics of this obsession who see affordability pushing aside other ways of measuring economic power. Oren Cass, founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, argues that treating Americans foremost as consumersfails to respect them as workers. Antitrust crusader Lina Khan, now an adviser to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — perhaps the quintessential U.S. politician of the affordability era — haspushed for a more capacious view of markets. (Amazon, after all, has helped to bring down the prices Americans pay for all sorts of goods, but at what Khan and others say is the expense of sellers and the choice they present consumers.)
（毕竟，亚马逊帮助降低了美国人购买各种商品的价格，但正如汗和其他人所说，这是以卖家的利益和他们向消费者提供的选择为代价的。）但目前，可负担性将长期存在。因此，我们派遣记者遍访POLITICO全球新闻室，寻找解决方案——从合理的到可疑的，不作评价且无特定顺序呈现——以捕捉政治家们无法忽视的讨论广度。
But for now, affordability is here to stay. So we sent reporters across POLITICO’s global newsroom hunting for solutions — from the reasonable to the questionable, presented without judgment and in no particular order — that capture the breadth of the discussion no politician can ignore.