May Day Strong, in The Real Affordability Agenda, identifies an affordability crisis impacting working families across the United States. It finds “the basics of a good life — an affordable home, quality healthcare, nutritious food, a dignified job, and beyond — are increasingly out of reach for millions of Americans.”

Against this backdrop, reality-challenged would-be dictator Donald Trump has been describing the U.S. economy as “roaring,” including in his State of the Union address where he said “The roaring economy is roaring like never before.” He’s also pointed to the Dow Jones hitting 50,000 as a major achievement. The question that must be asked of Trump’s assessment of the economy is: For whom is it roaring? Not for working people, but definitely for Trump and his family and billionaire backers, enriching themselves from workers’ tax dollars.

Trump’s war against Iran and Lebanon has driven oil prices up, which raises gas prices and the price of goods that require trucking for distribution, which is almost everything working people use in daily life. Prices for everyday needs are all going higher as this war, based on false claims by Trump, continues its murderous destruction.

May Day Strong’s Real Affordability Agenda finds “wage stagnation and declining worker power are on the rise despite surging corporate profits; we demand structural reforms to secure dignified employment. We demand mandated living wages aligned with productivity growth and a jobs guarantee program to put displaced and unemployed workers in good jobs.”

The Trump economy is unable to create jobs, despite what the President says. As reported by the New York Times, “Employers cut 92,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent.”

Roughly 150,000 to 165,000 people enter the U.S. labor force every month on net. This is often cited as the number of jobs needed just to keep up with population growth and keep the unemployment rate stable. Job losses indicate that the job market is not keeping up with new entrants, including youth looking for first-time jobs.

Overall (adult) unemployment is 4.4% — up from 4.3% in January. Youth unemployment (ages 16–24) is 9.5% — up from 8.9% in January, meaning youth unemployment is more than double the overall unemployment rate. This roughly 2-to-1 ratio between youth and adult unemployment is a pretty consistent historical pattern in the U.S., reflecting the capitalist need for a reserve force of unemployed potential scabs, and for people to push into working in the ever-expanding prison-industrial complex and into joining the military. Capitalists care nothing for the dreams and aspirations of the U.S. (or any other) youth, whom they see as disposable commodities, similar to bombs and toilet paper.

May Day Strong’s demand for structural reforms reflects an imperative today as AI and other forms of automation continue eroding the number of workers needed for better paying industrial jobs. Further, the U.S. focus on trillion-dollar military budgets does nothing to help increase the number of jobs; military contracts have been proven to require fewer workers than peacetime industrial projects.

Several studies, including work from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst, have compared job creation across different types of government spending. The findings consistently show that $1 billion spent on education creates roughly 26,000+ jobs, healthcare around 17,000, and clean energy/infrastructure in a similar range — while the same amount spent on the military creates closer to 11,000–13,000 jobs.

The military budget is best seen as welfare for the billionaire class; bombs and bullets, like human soldiers themselves, are seen as disposable commodities that must be continuously replenished and upgraded, guaranteeing a steady flow of workers’ tax money into the pockets of the super-rich few who reap billions for their private coffers from the financial-military-industrial complex.

The American Prospect article, Killing Kids in Iran While Kids in the U.S. Go Hungry, quotes a worker, Brenda, who is concerned that while so many people are struggling to eat and staring down major cuts to federal nutrition assistance, the Trump administration is spending billions of dollars on a war with Iran. “What I see every day in my community,” Brenda said, is there are hard-working people “struggling to afford basics, just like I am. Groceries are costing more. Rent costs more. A lot of people are having to choose between paying their electric bill or buying medication or keeping a roof over their head … Our own people are dying because of a lack of necessities.”

At the Communist Party USA’s 2025 Peace Conference 2.0, the Party’s Labor Commission said “We know the war economy is a racket. It’s a system that rewards corporations for waste with weapons costing more than their weight in gold. This system has hollowed out our country’s productive capacity. We are the world’s top weapons dealer, yet we cannot build our own subway cars at scale. This system steals our best engineers and machinists to produce instruments of death while our bridges and railways crumble.”

What is the solution? “Genuine peace,” the Labor Commission continued, “is more than the absence of war, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. It is the presence of justice and a secure future for the entire U.S. working class. For too long, industrial workers have been told they must choose between a paycheck and their morals — that their survival depends on building weapons of war for transnational corporations.”

The concept of a Just Transition means that workers can unite and reshape the economy, moving from one focused on the destructive military to one focused on productive industry, keeping the working class protected through the transition so no worker is left behind. It prioritizes the interests of the working class to the benefit of the whole society.

The struggle to move toward a more just economy even within the confines of capitalist exploitation and warmongering continues. Three major unions in California — the Teamsters, the Service Employees, and the United Health Care Workers West, an SEIU affiliate — are all now pushing to put a 5% billionaires’ tax referendum on the state’s November ballot.

Further, on March 2, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced S.2845 and H.R.5427 in Congress to implement a 5% annual surtax on the net worth of anyone with $1 billion or more. While the bills can’t realistically pass in the current electoral configuration of the Congress and with the current billionaire president, these bills illustrate one action workers can support in the struggle for the necessary redistribution of wealth needed to meet the needs of the vast majority of people living in the U.S. and the world — the working class.

The program of the Communist Party USA envisions the military “budget slashed to a fraction of current spending with funding transferred to social programs.”

The unjust and illegal U.S. war on Iran and Lebanon must be stopped; it is destroying the lives of working people across the country and the world. Along with that, the U.S. must urgently transition from a war economy to a peace economy, including developing green industry and protecting the environment.

Resist!

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Images: Protest at AIG in DC by Jobs with Justice. CC BY-NC 2.0. CPUSA and YCL at the End Fossil Fuels march by CPUSA. CC BY-NC 2.0.