Across Pennsylvania, families are doing everything right — working, budgeting and planning — yet it still feels harder to get by. The reason is not hard to find: the cost of everyday life has risen faster than paychecks, and the squeeze is showing up in nearly every monthly bill.
At the Pennsylvania Policy Center, we recently examined the real state of affordability for Pennsylvanians. What the numbers show is a persistent, broad-based pressure, from the grocery store to the doctor’s office to the utility bill arriving in the mailbox, that cuts through geography and party lines.
Yes, inflation has slowed from its peak. But prices remain significantly higher than they were just a few years ago.
Energy costs are surging, too. Utility bills in Pennsylvania have spiked 14% in just over a year. The region’s grid operator, PJM, saw capacity auction prices jump more than 800% in the past year, and these costs trickle down to ratepayers. Meanwhile, federal rollbacks of clean energy investments have destroyed or delayed 173,000 clean energy jobs nationwide and eliminated the cheaper alternatives that were helping bring bills down.
And it’s not just energy. Health care premiums are ballooning. During Pennsylvania’s most recent marketplace enrollment period, roughly 85,000 people dropped coverage, and for many who stayed, average premiums more than doubled. Tens of thousands more reduced their plans to cope.
Nearly two million Pennsylvanians rely on SNAP to put food on the table. Yet federal policy changes could push more than 140,000 people in our state off food assistance, not because their need has disappeared, but because new administrative barriers make it harder to stay enrolled.
All of this is happening while Pennsylvania’s minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 an hour, where it has been for more than 16 years. It is now the lowest minimum wage of any neighboring state. Roughly 1.3 million workers in the commonwealth would benefit from raising it.
When we talk about affordability, we are really talking about a widening gap between what life costs and what families earn.
It’s important to be clear about why this gap keeps growing.
For years, federal economic policy has prioritized tax giveaways for the wealthiest Americans — multimillionaires, billionaires and large corporations — while asking working families to shoulder a greater share of the burden. Under the latest round of tax policies, households earning less than about $361,000 a year are paying more in taxes on average, while the richest one percent receive tax cuts.
When the tax code is tilted toward the very top, it drains revenue that could strengthen health care, stabilize energy costs, support food security, and invest in the foundations families rely on. Those choices shift costs downward onto working families and onto states.
Here in Pennsylvania, we are already seeing the consequences. The state has balanced increasingly tight budgets through one-time fixes and short-term maneuvers, limiting its ability to make sustained investments and responsibly meet long-term obligations. The governor’s current proposal once again relies on drawing down the Rainy Day Fund. At the scale proposed, those reserves would cover less than two years of projected budget shortfalls, underscoring that this approach is not a long-term solution. At the same time, federal budget cuts and policy changes risk pushing even more costs onto a state budget that is already strained. Without new revenue solutions, those pressures could translate into deeper cuts to education, health care, and other services families depend on.
Meanwhile, billionaires like Elon Musk enjoy what amounts to a blank check to run up utility bills powering sprawling data centers at the expense of everyday Americans.
But there is a better way. The Pennsylvania Policy Center’s Pennsylvanians Together: For Our Common Wealth campaign outlines a practical approach: modernize our tax code so that multinational corporations and the wealthiest households contribute their fair share, and use that revenue to stabilize the budget while strengthening the foundations of our commonwealth.
Ultimately, the health of our commonwealth should be measured by a simple question: Can working families afford to live with dignity and security?
Right now, too many Pennsylvanians would answer that question with uncertainty. And that is exactly why we need an honest conversation, grounded in facts, not political talking points, about the choices being made in Washington and what they mean for kitchen tables across the commonwealth.
Felicity A. Williams is executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center.