You can’t Make America Healthy Again without making America Families economically secure again. The same corporate interests that filled our food with toxins also suppressed wages for 50 years. It’s the same playbook: privatize profits, socialize costs, capture the regulators.

I spent thousands of hours helping RFK Jr. reach the point at which President Trump offered him the helm of HHS. As Nevada Campaign Manager for Team Kennedy 2024, I believed in the mission: Make America Healthy Again. End the chronic disease epidemic. Clean up our food supply. Restore trust in our health institutions. Generally, stop corporate capture of our government agencies!

But here’s what I learned from my 33 years in tech, my experience being forced to train my foreign replacement at 63, and my work building the VIA US Workers: You can’t make America healthy again without fixing what’s broken in American work.

The MAHA movement is fighting the symptoms. The US Majority is fighting the root cause. And it’s time we joined forces.

The Connection Nobody’s Talking About

When Secretary Kennedy talks about removing petroleum-based dyes from our food, reforming SNAP to prioritize whole foods, and investigating the autism epidemic, he’s addressing real problems. The MAHA community—led by passionate mothers and health advocates—is right to demand better.

But here’s the question nobody’s asking: Why did American families start eating processed food in the first place?

The answer isn’t ignorance. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t a lack of values.

The answer is 1973.

The Year Everything Changed

In 1973, something broke in the American economy. Productivity kept rising, but worker compensation flatlined. For the first time in American history, working harder didn’t mean earning more.

The numbers tell the story:

• 1973: Average hourly wage was $4.03 (equivalent to $23.68 in 2024 dollars)
• 2024: Average hourly wage is $22.65
• Result: After 50 years, real wages have essentially not increased at all

Families responded the only way they could:

• Mothers who wanted to stay home went to work (dual-income families rose from 46.9% to 53%)
• Single-earner households became dual-income by necessity
• Workers took on gig economy jobs (now 36% of the workforce)
• Families borrowed to make ends meet (average household debt: $105,056)
• Social services became essential, not emergency

And here’s what nobody connects to the health crisis: Families stopped having time to cook.

It wasn’t a choice. It was mathematics.

The Myth of Liberation

There is a lie that has been told so often, so smoothly, and for so long that most Americans have stopped recognizing it as a lie. The lie goes something like this: women entered the workforce because feminism liberated them, the economy expanded to accommodate their talents, and the American family evolved into something more modern and equitable. It is a beautiful story. It is also, in the ways that matter most, complete bullshit.

Here is the truth. The same corporate oligarchy that suppressed wages for fifty years, that stole thirty trillion dollars from working people, that turned the American worker into a disposable commodity — that same machine forced both parents out of the home and into the labor market not as an act of liberation but as an act of economic survival. And then, having created the crisis, it monetized the consequences. The childcare industry. The fast-food industry. The convenience economy. Every dollar a family spends because neither parent has the time to cook, to clean, to be present — that is a dollar flowing upward to the same people who stole the wages that would have given them the choice in the first place.

This is not an argument against women working. Let that be crystal clear. Women should have every opportunity to pursue any career, at any level, for any reason they choose. The crime is not that women work. The crime is that they have no choice. The crime is that a system designed to enrich shareholders and suppress labor costs has made it economically impossible for any family — regardless of who works and who stays home — to survive on one income the way their grandparents did.

And the numbers tell that story with brutal precision.

See Appendix I for complete data summary.

The Golden Age That Was Stolen

In 1970, the year before Lewis Powell wrote his infamous memo to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the median household income in the United States, adjusted for inflation, was enough for a single breadwinner to own a home, maintain a car, put food on the table, and save for the future. The American Dream was not a slogan. It was an economic reality for the broad middle class.

By 2025, that reality has been so thoroughly dismantled that experts describe single-income households as “a bygone era.” Bankrate’s economic analyst Sarah Foster put it plainly: “We used to be in this golden age where you could own a home, a car, and get by on a single income — that is a bygone era.” Mark Hamrick, Bankrate’s senior economic analyst, echoed the point: “Where there was a time in the U. S. when a married couple, with children, could get by with a single-wage earner in the house, those days are mostly vestiges of the past.”

What happened between 1970 and now was not a natural economic evolution. It was a deliberate campaign. The Powell Memo laid out the strategy. The U. S. Chamber of Commerce executed it. The Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Federalist Society — they all played their roles. They broke unions. They deregulated industries. They shipped jobs overseas. They automated factories. They suppressed the minimum wage. And when real wages flatlined for the bottom eighty percent of American workers, they created a system that required two incomes to achieve what one had previously provided.

The data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms the result: in about half of all married-couple families today, both spouses are employed. In families with children, two-thirds of all households have both parents working outside the home. Even six-figure earners told The Harris Poll that living on one income feels “nearly impossible.”

This was by design.

The Childcare Trap

When both parents are forced into the labor market, someone has to watch the children. That someone is increasingly expensive, increasingly scarce, and increasingly unavailable to the families who need them most.

The average cost of daycare across the United States is $13,254 per child per year. For infants — the youngest, most vulnerable children — the national average is $14,802. In Washington, D. C., infant care costs $28,356 per year. In Massachusetts, it is $26,709. In California, $21,945. In Colorado, $21,840.

Let those numbers settle for a moment. A family with two children in daycare in Massachusetts is paying more than $53,000 a year — before taxes, before rent, before food, before the electric bill. That is more than the median individual income in America. That is not childcare. That is economic warfare against families.

The average American household spends fourteen percent of its income on childcare for a single child. In Minnesota, it consumes 18.7 percent of median household income. In Massachusetts, 18.1 percent. In Alaska, eighteen percent. And these are averages, which means half the families in these states are paying even more.

Childcare costs have been increasing at roughly twice the rate of overall inflation. When pandemic-era federal childcare funding lapsed in 2023, the industry lost approximately 100,000 workers. The “childcare cliff” that experts warned about has materialized — not as a dramatic crash but as a slow, grinding plateau that has driven up costs and created shortages in communities across the country.

And it is about to get worse. Twenty-one percent of childcare workers nationwide are immigrants. In states like New York and California, the percentage is far higher. The current administration’s crackdown on immigration is poised to gut the already-thin childcare workforce, driving costs even higher and pushing more mothers out of the labor force entirely.

Because that is what happens when childcare is too expensive or simply unavailable: mothers leave. Not fathers. Mothers.

The Mothers Who Are Leaving

The data from KPMG’s analysis of Census data tells a story of accelerating retreat. College-educated mothers with very young children saw their labor force participation fall to seventy-seven percent in August 2025, down from a high near eighty percent in 2023. Women without bachelor’s degrees with young children saw a decline of about one percentage point over the same period. Fathers — both with and without degrees — saw slight increases.

Read that again. Mothers are leaving. Fathers are not.

The exodus started when pandemic-era childcare supports lapsed in 2023. It accelerated as the job market weakened and as federal job cuts and return-to-office mandates took a disproportionate toll on working women. Companies that once offered the flexibility that allowed mothers to juggle caregiving and careers are now demanding employees return to the office — even on hybrid schedules that demolish the tightly choreographed childcare arrangements that working parents depend on.

As KPMG senior economist Matthew Nestler wrote: “Facing these sudden shifts, one parent, disproportionately the mother, reduces work hours or leaves the labor force entirely.”

In 2025, caregiving became the number one reason women left the workforce, according to Catalyst data. The Great Exit, as Fortune magazine called it, is not a choice. It is a forced retreat from economic participation driven by the intersection of stagnant wages, skyrocketing childcare costs, and an employment culture that treats motherhood as a liability rather than a contribution to society.

And the retreat carries a devastating financial penalty.

The Motherhood Penalty

Bankrate’s analysis of Census Bureau data reveals that full-time working mothers with children under eighteen earned a median salary of $56,680 in 2024. Full-time working fathers earned $76,388. That is a thirty-five percent pay gap — wider than in 2023 or 2022.

Mothers earn seventy-four cents for every dollar a father earns. Over a thirty-year career, that gap translates to more than $591,000 in lost earnings for mothers compared to fathers. Six hundred thousand dollars. That is a house. That is a retirement fund. That is the difference between financial security and financial precarity.

The penalty is compounding. Women start out earning less than men even before they have children — single childless women earn ninety-three cents on the dollar compared to single childless men. When women get married, the gap widens to seventy-nine cents. When they have children, it drops to seventy-four cents. Each stage of life that society celebrates — partnership, parenthood — comes with an economic punishment for women.

Meanwhile, men experience what researchers call the “fatherhood bonus.” Fathers working full-time earned twenty-five percent more than men without children — $76,388 versus $61,308. Becoming a father makes a man more valuable in the eyes of employers. Becoming a mother makes a woman less so. As Joy Misra, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explained: “Men get a premium when they have children because employers think of them as super responsible because they want to be able to support their families.”

The motherhood penalty does not merely suppress wages. It derails careers. Research from the Federal University of Uberlândia and Australian National University found that mothers are more often than fathers passed over for promotions or forced into part-time or flexible jobs for which they are overqualified. The penalty compounds over decades — lower wages lead to lower retirement savings, smaller Social Security benefits, and greater economic vulnerability in old age.

And for single mothers, the damage is catastrophic. Single working mothers with children under eighteen earned $45,604 in 2024, compared to $55,588 for single working fathers — a twenty-two percent gap. These are women already stretched to the breaking point, already doing the impossible work of parenting alone while working full-time, and the economy punishes them for it.

As Yana Rodgers, faculty director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University, explained: “We still have women doing a disproportionate amount of care work. As long as that’s going to continue to happen, and as long as there are perceptions that care work is women’s work, we are going to continue to see a motherhood penalty.”

The Gender Wage Gap Widens

After years of incremental progress, the gender wage gap is moving in the wrong direction. Census data shows the gap has widened for two consecutive years. Full-time working women earn eighty-three cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn — and the trajectory is deteriorating, not improving.

This is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening in the context of a deliberate political and cultural campaign to roll back women’s economic gains. The current White House has proposed cutting funding for the Women’s Bureau, the division of the Labor Department specifically tasked with studying women’s employment. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has moved to limit women’s roles in the military. The administration has gutted agencies where women hold the majority of positions, including the Department of Education. And amid a crackdown on corporate diversity initiatives, private companies have stopped tracking gender statistics — making it harder to see the damage in real time.

This is not coincidence. This is strategy. The same corporate oligarchy that benefits from wage suppression benefits from a world in which women’s economic participation is constrained, invisible, and expendable. A woman who cannot afford childcare and leaves the workforce is one less worker with bargaining power. A woman who takes a pay cut for flexibility is one more worker subsidizing corporate profits with her own financial security.

The erosion of women’s economic progress is not a side effect of the thirty-trillion-dollar heist. It is a feature.

The Two-Income Trap

The 2003 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke identified the structural trap. The research showed that the entry of women into the workforce did not make families more financially secure. It made them more vulnerable.

Here is how the trap works. When families went from one income to two, the housing market, the education system, and the healthcare industry adjusted upward. Bidding wars for homes in good school districts intensified because families had more income to bid with. The cost of college tuition accelerated because families could borrow more. Healthcare premiums rose because insurers could charge more. The second income did not create a financial cushion. It became the new baseline — the minimum required to maintain a middle-class existence.

And then the trap snapped shut. With both parents working, families lost their financial safety net. In the single-income era, if the breadwinner lost a job, the other parent could enter the workforce as a backup. In the two-income era, there is no backup. Both incomes are already committed. A job loss, a medical emergency, a divorce — any disruption can send a two-income family into financial freefall.

The data from 2024 and 2025 confirms the thesis with grim precision. Health insurance premiums for family coverage have jumped more than twenty-five percent since 2020, outpacing both inflation and wage growth. Childcare costs have increased more than five percent year after year over the same period. A housing shortfall of 4.9 million units has pushed rents and mortgage payments far beyond what a single earner can afford. The cost of college continues its relentless upward march.

The two-income family is not thriving. It is treading water. And every year, the water rises a little higher.

The Fertility Crisis: An Economic Choice

The decline in American fertility is not a cultural accident. It is an economic calculation made by millions of couples who cannot afford the families they want. When childcare costs exceed a mortgage, when housing prices have outpaced wage growth for decades, when student debt hangs over young adults like a storm cloud, having children becomes a luxury good rather than a human right.

The data is stark. In 1970, the average American woman had 2.4 children — above the 2.1 replacement rate needed to maintain population stability. Today, that number has fallen to 1.6, well below replacement. This decline tracks precisely with the erosion of worker power and the rise of the two-income trap. When one income could support a family, fertility was stable. When two incomes became necessary to maintain the same standard of living, fertility collapsed.

The economic pressures are cumulative. Housing costs have risen 66% relative to income since 1970. Childcare costs have increased by 70% in just the past decade. Healthcare costs have exploded. Student loan debt now exceeds $1.7 trillion, with the average borrower owing $37,000. Each of these factors is a direct consequence of policies that prioritized corporate profits over worker wages.

The fertility crisis is also a national security crisis. A shrinking population means a shrinking workforce, which means a shrinking tax base to support Social Security, Medicare, and national defense. The Pentagon has identified declining fertility as a strategic threat to military recruitment. The economic implications are equally severe — fewer workers means slower growth, less innovation, and reduced global competitiveness.

The US Majority Amendment addresses this crisis at its root. By restoring worker bargaining power, raising wages, and making housing, healthcare, and childcare affordable again, it restores the economic foundation for family formation. When one income can once again support a family, when young adults are not crushed by debt, when having children is not a financial sacrifice, fertility will recover.

This is not about government mandates or social engineering. It is about removing the artificial economic barriers that corporations have erected between Americans and the families they want. The fertility crisis is a symptom of a system that has made family formation unaffordable. The cure is economic justice.

The Families Who Never Had a Chance

The motherhood penalty and the two-income trap do not fall equally on all women. For Black women, who earn sixty-nine cents for every dollar earned by white men, the penalty is compounded by racial discrimination. For Latina women, who earn fifty-seven cents on the dollar, the gap is even more devastating. For women in rural communities where childcare options are scarce or nonexistent, the trap is inescapable. For immigrant women, whose childcare networks are being dismantled by deportation policies, the situation is existential.

The corporate oligarchy that suppressed wages and destroyed worker power did not discriminate in its theft. It stole from everyone. But the consequences of that theft fall hardest on the women — and the families — who had the least to begin with.

A Black single mother earning sixty-nine cents on the dollar, paying fourteen percent of her income on childcare for one child, working in a gig economy job with no benefits and no predictable schedule — she is not experiencing a market failure. She is experiencing the intended outcome of a system designed to extract maximum value from labor while providing minimum support for the human beings who perform it.

What the US Majority Amendment Changes

The US Majority Amendment does not mention childcare. It does not mention the gender wage gap. It does not mention the motherhood penalty by name. But it addresses every one of these crises at their root — by dismantling the corporate money machine that has killed every piece of family-supporting legislation for fifty years.

Consider the record. Paid family leave — introduced in Congress repeatedly since the 1990s. Killed every time by corporate lobbying. Universal childcare — proposed, studied, endorsed by economists across the political spectrum. Killed by the Chamber of Commerce and its allies. The Paycheck Fairness Act — passed the House multiple times. Killed in the Senate by dark money campaigns. Minimum wage increases — supported by seventy percent of Americans in poll after poll. Blocked by the same corporate interests that fund the campaigns of the senators who vote no.

The Amendment does not pass these laws. It makes passing them possible. When corporations can no longer spend unlimited dark money to purchase legislative outcomes, the calculus changes overnight. A senator who supports paid family leave no longer faces a $5 million attack ad campaign funded by anonymous corporate donors. A representative who votes for universal childcare no longer gets primaried by a Chamber-backed challenger. The policies that every other developed nation on earth already provides — paid leave, affordable childcare, equal pay enforcement, a living minimum wage — become politically achievable for the first time since the corporate capture of Congress began.

That is what the Amendment changes for women and families. Not a promise. A precondition. The constitutional precondition for the legislation that would end the two-income trap, close the motherhood penalty, and give American families something they have not had in fifty years: a fighting chance.

The Choice We Face

The American family is not failing because parents are lazy. It is not failing because women made bad choices. It is not failing because millennials spend too much on avocado toast or because Gen Z doesn’t know the value of hard work. The American family is failing because a fifty-year corporate campaign systematically dismantled the economic conditions that made family life possible.

The solution is not individual. It is structural. No amount of budgeting advice, salary negotiation tips, or high-yield savings accounts will fix a system that is designed to extract wealth from working families and transfer it to shareholders and executives. The solution requires changing the rules of the game itself.

These are not radical proposals. Every other developed nation on earth provides some combination of paid family leave, affordable childcare, and meaningful equal pay enforcement. Canada offers eighteen months of parental leave. Germany guarantees a childcare spot for every child over one. The United Kingdom mandates paid maternity leave of thirty-nine weeks. The United States offers none of this. We stand alone among wealthy democracies — not because we cannot afford it, but because corporate money has purchased the political system that would provide it.

The thirty-trillion-dollar heist did not just steal wages from working families. It stole something that cannot be measured in dollars. It stole time. The hours that should have been spent reading to your children before bed. The evenings that should have been spent around the dinner table instead of in a drive-through lane because both parents are too exhausted to cook. The weekends that should have been spent in the park instead of working a second shift to cover the childcare bill from the first shift. The school plays missed. The first steps unseen. The bedtime stories never read. The slow, quiet erosion of family life that no economic indicator captures and no politician acknowledges.

You cannot get that time back. It is gone. The system took it and converted it into quarterly earnings reports.

But you can make sure it stops. You can make sure that the next generation of mothers does not have to choose between a career and her children. That the next generation of fathers does not have to work seventy hours a week to provide what one income provided for their grandfathers. That the next generation of families is not ground down into exhaustion and debt by a system that treats their labor as a commodity and their children as an externality.

That is what 2028 is for. Not revenge. Restoration. The amendment that breaks the corporate stranglehold, and the Congress that finally passes the laws American families have been waiting fifty years to see.

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Characteristics of Families 2024; KPMG Analysis of Census Data, October 2025; Bankrate Motherhood Penalty Study 2025; Economic Policy Institute Childcare Costs in the United States; Self Financial Childcare Costs By State Analysis 2025; CNBC/Harris Poll Single-Income Household Survey 2025; Census Bureau Current Population Survey 2024; Pew Research Center Dual-Income Families Analysis 2025; The Two-Income Trap (2003); Axios/KPMG The Great Exit Analysis, October 2025; Catalyst Workforce Data 2025.

Why This Matters Now

The chronic disease epidemic is real. The food system is broken. The MAHA movement is right about that.

But we can’t fix the food system without fixing the economic system that makes unhealthy food the only option for working families.

The data proves it:

• Real wages unchanged in 50 years
• Housing costs up 66% relative to income
• Healthcare costs up 600% per capita
• Student debt up 677%
• Average household debt: $105,056
• 36% of workers in the precarious gig economy
• 80% of gig workers struggle with a $1,000 emergency

This isn’t individual failure. This is systemic design.

Secretary Kennedy has the platform. The MAHA community has the passion. The US Majority has the economic analysis and policy solution.

Together, we can build a movement that addresses both symptoms and root causes.

We can Make America Healthy Again by making work work for families.

The Bottom Line

Make America Healthy Again is a powerful vision. But it’s incomplete without economic justice.

The US Majority is fighting for economic justice. But we need the MAHA community’s passion, platform, and political access.

We need each other.

The chronic disease epidemic, the processed food crisis, the autism surge, the obesity epidemic—these aren’t just health problems. They’re economic problems. They’re labor problems. They’re the inevitable result of 50 years of wage stagnation and corporate capture.

You can’t supplement your way out of economic anxiety.

You can’t meal prep your way out of poverty wages.

You can’t wellness your way out of systemic exploitation.

Real health requires economic security. Economic security requires worker protection. Worker protection requires the CLAWS Act.

And making that happen requires MAHA and the US Majority working together.