Warnock Calls Affordability Crisis a “Spiritual Crisis” in Landmark Speech

In a speech at the Center for American Progress, Senator Reverend Warnock offered a unique spiritual perspective on the affordability crisis

The Senator argued that cost-of-living increases over the past few decades have led to a deeper spiritual crisis in our country

Warnock urged stronger executive action to address affordability and pushed his own party to propose more creative and aggressive policy solutions

Senator Warnock: "Decades of this low-grade fever left untreated has brought us to where we are today, a nation in crisis, a nation that has become disconnected from the values that make us who we are, a nation where we no longer see our neighbors as crucial to our own success, but as competitors in a competition for scarce resources. These deficits in a wealthy nation and on a plentiful planet speak to a spiritual deficit that at its core is a lapse in the covenant that we have with one another"

Washington, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-GA) offered a unique perspective on the twin spiritual and affordability crises plaguing the United States. The Senator spoke at the Center for American Progress as part of the Path Forward Speaker Series. In his speech, Senator Warnock argued that the ongoing affordability crisis has created a spiritual crisis in America, saying that decades of politicians failing to center the people they serve has undermined the American dream, created a cycle of division and despair, and ultimately led to the deep divisions and economic disparity we see today.

Senator Warnock: "People are working harder and harder but are seeing less and less from the work they're putting in. Young people are wondering if they'll ever be able to afford a home. Older people are wondering if they will be able to retire with dignity. Those of us who live in the middle are trying to take care of our children, take care of our parents who are dealing with the blessings and burdens of aging. Workers are seeing that they're creating wealth for others, yet they are barely able to get by. When you have that kind of increasing disconnect between the American promise and the lived reality of everyday people, not only is it a problem for your material wellbeing, I submit that it is a drag on the spirit, a gnawing feeling that things are amiss."

Senator Warnock criticized his own party for being too influenced by corporate interests: "However, we cannot be successful unless we reckon with the deeply uncomfortable truth that corporate interests have too much influence over both parties… When I first got to the Senate, one of my biggest accomplishments was allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices for the first time… I'm glad we did it. But even as we did that, and I'm proud of that work, the truth is we allow too many concessions to Big Pharma. We started with only 10 negotiated drugs in 2022 and those savings do not go into effect until 2026, four long years just to get us started. It was a lesson for me as a new senator about the ways in which corporate lobbyists have far too much influence in our politics. Too often we have the best politicians that money can buy, and this has consequences for ordinary people."

Senator Warnock pushed the President to use executive authority to raise wages saying, "What if, instead of bullying powerful corporations to build himself a ballroom, the President could push companies to pay their workers a living wage? For example, the President could ask corporations to share their record profits with their employees, before they reward their shareholders, in the form of a bonus or a raise."

He also called for called for urgent action to tackle housing costs: "If local governments want federal money to build roads, those roads had better lead to homes. And if they won't build, the federal government has built homes before. It could put shovels in the ground again today, building and selling homes directly to Americans at a lower cost."

Senator Warnock pushed both parties to champion more creative and aggressive policy solutions to the affordability crisis adding that, "For too long, politicians in both parties have failed to center the people and the cycle of despair has led us further and further into the spiritual abyss. Part of the reason, if we are honest, we got here is that our politics has only operated in the narrowest realm of the possible."

A transcript of Senator Warnock's speech can be found below:

It's great to be here at the Center for American Progress.

Indeed I stand here as an example and an embodiment of that very idea of the promise of American progress, the belief that we can build a future where each does a little bit better than their parents. I stand here knowing that I have lived that dream.

I love America because we always have a path to make this country better, yet I and all of us are living through a time when we honestly feel that dream slipping away. And we all feel it, regardless of our politics, people on the left and the right, Democrats, Republicans, Independents. Here's what we have in common: we all feel it. We may not agree on how to fix it, but we know it's real, and the stakes could not be higher, because the question is whether we can build together a future worthy of our children.

In my work, I always try to center our children in these conversations, because regardless of whatever fancy titles I may have, my most important job is father of two precious children. They are my North Star. And long before the people of Georgia sent me to be a voice for them in the United States Senate, long before I was called to serve as senior pastor and preacher at Ebenezer Baptist, where Dr. King served, I was just a kid growing up in the housing projects of Savannah, Georgia, number 11 out of 12 children. Clearly my folks, who were Pentecostal preachers, read the Scripture: be fruitful and multiply.

There was not a lot of money in our house, but I feel like I hit the jackpot. There was a lot of love in my house, a lot of laughter and deep faith. I learned lessons like the importance of hard work from my father and my mother. And my family and my community convinced that kid growing up in the housing projects on Cape Street that I could fly. That's why I decided I was going to Morehouse College. I often say that I went to college on a full faith scholarship. That's when you don't have enough money for the first semester. But at 17 years old, I was so captivated by the faith and the spirit of Dr. King, who died a year before my birth, that I was going to Dr. King's alma mater no matter what.

God always has a dream bigger than the dream we've been dreaming for ourselves. I just wanted to go to Dr. King's college. I didn't know that one day I'd lead the church. But with hard work, discipline, and determination, I graduated four years later. I got it done.

But the truth is that for all my hard work and discipline, I did not accomplish it alone. I was able to earn that degree and three others after it because of Pell Grants, low interest student loans, and working a job on the side. It wasn't easy, but I had a path to progress. Also, you're looking at a Head Start baby. I know what that program does. I know what good federal public policy looks like. And then Upward Bound, another federal program part of TRIO, put a kid from the projects on a college campus during the summer and on Saturdays for academic enrichment. And so I did not have to wonder if I belonged in college. I was already on the campus. All good federal policy that provided for me a path to progress. But what keeps me up at night these days is the recognition that coming from where I'm from, it would be much harder for me to achieve that now than it was back then.

I submit that all of these federal policies, which allowed a kid from public housing to go on to get four degrees, to build a life, and to make a living, to make a contribution, were not simply government programs in the pejorative sense in which that word is flown around these days, but rather a manifestation of the covenant we share with one another as an American people. That is my children cannot truly succeed unless my neighbor's children succeed. My children are not saved unless my neighbor's children are saved.

It's the idea that, in the words of Dr. King, we are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

So I stand this morning worried about that kid, that kid today who lives on Cape Street and all the Cape Streets across our country where everyday superheroes live, hidden in plain sight. From Atlanta to Appalachia, the big cities and rural towns, the promise of American progress is slipping away, and understandably, it leads to a deep frustration and anger that bubbles up in our politics, our public life, and also in the everyday interactions between citizens. Have you flown on a plane lately? Been stuck in traffic? There is this anger that's beneath the surface. There is a sense that something is wrong, something is broken and in need of repair. Over the last 50 years, real wages for working families have been stagnant. Today, the price of everything from health care to housing to energy bills to child care is becoming more expensive.

People are working harder and harder but are seeing less and less from the work they're putting in. Young people are wondering if they'll ever be able to afford a home. Older people are wondering if they will be able to retire with dignity. Those of us who live in the middle are trying to take care of our children, take care of our parents who are dealing with the blessings and burdens of aging. Workers are seeing that they're creating wealth for others, yet they are barely able to get by.

When you have that kind of increasing disconnect between the American promise and the lived reality of everyday people, not only is it a problem for your material wellbeing, I submit that it is a drag on the spirit, a gnawing feeling that things are amiss.

A whole country has what I call a low-grade fever. You know when you wake up and something doesn't feel right? You can't quite put your finger on it, but you know you don't feel too good. The ache, the fogginess, and the fatigue that does not allow you to show up in your full strength, to be your best self. We've all been there, but if you wake up like that every day, it takes its toll. It suggests that something deeper is wrong.

And so decades of this low-grade fever left untreated has brought us to where we are today, a nation in crisis, a nation that has become disconnected from the values that make us who we are, a nation where we no longer see our neighbors as crucial to our own success, but as competitors in a competition for scarce resources. These deficits in a wealthy nation and on a plentiful planet speak to a spiritual deficit that at its core is a lapse in the covenant that we have with one another.

Hope is the infrastructure, it is the vaccine that protects our humanity. And when you lose hope, you get sick, [inaudible]. Your vision is unclear.

Suddenly, using your tax dollars towards some program to help some kid you'll never meet doesn't feel like a priority when you're struggling to set your own children up for success.

If people can't believe in the promise of opportunity, they may choose to put their faith in "strong men" who make false promises and provide targets for our anger. People who have no vision traffic in division. They do not know how to lead us, so they are trying to divide us.

This is how President Trump is able to take health care away from 15 million Americans and double the health care premiums of some 22 million Americans, while calling it waste, fraud, and abuse. The question we ought to ask ourselves is, what is he saying about those Americans? Are our neighbors waste? Meanwhile, we are witnessing the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. We saw it in one fell swoop.

Immigration raids near schools and churches. We see armed and masked federal agents and members of the military patrolling the streets of American cities. Propelling down apartment buildings of American cities, zip tying children. Mean spirited operations where it seems that cruelty is the point. And it's all being carried out in our name, and often in the name of religion. While some religious leaders aid and abet that claim or cosign it by their conspicuous silence, I remind them that King is right. There comes a time when silence is betrayal. My faith is not a weapon. My faith is a bridge, and I refuse to give in to those who are trying to convince us that we are at war with one another. Trumpism is a plague on the American conscience. And his ascendance to power is symptomatic of a nation that is soul weary and in the throes of a deep spiritual crisis.

I did not come to this conclusion lightly. It is a conclusion I come to as a pastor who has spent decades with people in the dim places, dark places where they can barely see light, counseling people drowning in deep cynicism and loneliness in a hyperconnected society. Despair.

I prayed with families in hospital waiting rooms as they make critical decisions around the care of their loved one, while also worrying how they are going to pay the bill. As a pastor and as a senator, I've delivered aid to people who work every day but still can't pay the rent because the housing is unaffordable.

This low-grade fever didn't just appear; it has been festering for decades as the American Dream has felt further and further out of grasp. For too long, politicians in both parties have failed to center the people and the cycle of despair has led us further and further into the spiritual abyss.

Part of the reason, if we are honest, we got here is that our politics has only operated in the narrowest realm of the possible. Strange thing, perhaps for someone in elected office to say, but I think that the vocabulary of our politics is too puny a language for the crisis that confronts us.

What can get 60 votes? What can get past corporate special interests and lobbyists? What won't hurt us in the very next election? So focused on the next election that we cannot think about the next generation. In that sense, we suffer not from a poverty of resources, but a poverty of moral imagination and moral courage.

And Americans are smart, they can sniff it out. They know it when politicians are obsessed with self-preservation. They know when folks in power are more focused on themselves than the people who sent them to Washington. That is why neither party enjoys high levels of favorability with the public.

But if we center the people, our policies will finally start to address the stress that working families are feeling under the weight of structural inequities. There's a growing chasm between how hard folks are working and the lives they're able to provide for themselves and their families. It's led to people feeling alienated from work and, in a real sense, from their purpose.

I believe in work. I had a hardworking dad, hardworking mom. Jobs give people a sense of dignity and a sense of pride. People don't mind working, despite the rhetoric we hear today, particularly as it is aimed towards the working poor. People don't mind working if they can get to share in some of the prosperity that they are creating for others, because sharing in that prosperity gives their work meaning. We must find a way to awaken that sense of purpose in people by centering the dignity of work. We're facing real obstacles in that goal, largely because many corporations are raking in record profits year after year, but many workers haven't seen real wage growth in decades. Folks in Washington seem to just fight for the wealthy and well-connected as working people get dealt a bad hand time and time again.

In this very moment, the President is using all the levers of government to benefit powerful corporations and his well-connected friends. If a corporation wants a tariff exemption, patent, approval on a merger, or a federal contract, they need only to bow to the President, kiss the ring, and bend to his self-serving policies. Right now we have naked, unadulterated, unabashed corruption. They're saying the quiet part out loud, no shame at all.

But what if those levers of government-those immense powers-were leveraged for working families instead?

What if, instead of bullying powerful corporations to build himself a ballroom, the President could push companies to pay their workers a living wage? For example, the President could ask corporations to share their record profits with their employees, before they reward their shareholders, in the form of a bonus or a raise.

The cashiers, the line cooks, the accountants, the machinists: Every worker adds value, and their pay should reflect that. That's not just about raising the minimum wage, which we absolutely must do. It's about respecting the dignity of work.

People should feel pride in what they do. They should share in the success of what they create. And they should be able to afford their families' basic needs with what they get paid for their work.

However, we cannot be successful unless we reckon with the deeply uncomfortable truth that corporate interests have too much influence over both parties. The voices of ordinary people are being squeezed out of the house of their own democracy.

I knew this as an activist pastor, now as a member of the Senate, I know it more than ever. I've seen it up close. When I first got to the Senate, one of my biggest accomplishments was allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices for the first time.

I want you to think about that, the fact that we had to fight, we had to pass a law in a capitalist society to get the power to negotiate with the seller, something they're trying to sell us tells you everything you need to know about the outsized impact of corporate interest in our politics.

I'm glad we did it. But even as we did that, and I'm proud of that work, the truth is we allow too many concessions to Big Pharma. We started with only 10 negotiated drugs in 2022 and those savings do not go into effect until 2026, four long years just to get us started. It was a lesson for me as a new senator about the ways in which corporate lobbyists have far too much influence in our politics. Too often we have the best politicians that money can buy, and this has consequences for ordinary people.

I met a woman a few years ago, I think of her often. Her name is Lacy McGee. She was putting herself through grad school to become a physical therapist, and she couldn't afford her school's health insurance. Because she had no other option, she resorted to buying insulin off Facebook Marketplace and meeting strangers in dimly lit parking lots to buy the medicine she needed to live. Georgians have told me about how they've had to get insulin from friends who had some leftover from their deceased relatives. Insulin is a 100 year old drug, the patent sold for $1. It shouldn't be expensive in the first place. It's unacceptable; it's immoral.

I'm proud of my work capping the cost at $35, but that struggle reveals Big Pharma, rich insurance companies have had a veto over health care policy in this country, which has resulted in a broken health care system that's dangerously unaffordable and leaves too many families deep in medical debt.

What if instead of letting rich insurance companies kill lifesaving health care ideas like a public health insurance option, we told them to lower their prices for families or face new competition from an affordable public health care plan?

And what if we also told Big Pharma that their days of bankrupting Americans with drugs developed with federal dollars are over?

Some states are already finding ways to make lifesaving drugs affordable. Why can't the federal government do the same? People desperately need inhalers, generics for EpiPens, and cholesterol drugs, but find them too expensive to afford.

Imagine if we could create good-paying jobs manufacturing life-saving drugs. And that's not the only way we could put folks back to work making and building things. What if we put the awesome powers of the government towards a massive home improvement project?

You know, when families come to me as a pastor, and they've been having a difficult time, having an argument, everybody's at each other's throats, they don't remember what the arguments are about. Believe it or not, here's my advice. I listen, and then I tell them to go to the local hardware store. Find something that needs upgrading in their home, work on the space you share together. Sometimes the cure to a good argument is some paint, plywood, and some tools where you get started on building and improving the common space that you share. While you're focused on building something, working on something rather than working on each other, maybe you can build back some trust. While you're fixing something, maybe you can fix some of the long term issues, or at least find the grace to work on them together. America needs a home improvement project.

What if we used the power of the federal government towards building five million new homes for homeownership, which will finally make the dream of building generational wealth real for millions of Americans?

If local governments want federal money to build roads, those roads had better lead to homes. And if they won't build, the federal government has built homes before. It could put shovels in the ground again today, building and selling homes directly to Americans at a lower cost.

Increasing the housing supply does more than make monthly mortgage payments more affordable; more supply means lower rent for renters too. And it's a way for young adults to create wealth and pave a path for a prosperous life for them and their families.

We can ensure everyone feels a sense of ownership in this great American improvement project by investing in technical apprenticeships for our children, for our young people. This would do more than just solve our catastrophic housing shortage; it would make thousands of young people a part of this great American project all while building a workforce that won't soon be replaced by AI.

We can also apply the same logic to childcare, to eldercare, the things that machines can't do. I believe that public policy is a letter we write to our children about the kind of nation we want to be. And the path out of our spiritual crisis begins with renewing the covenant we have for one another, of celebrating the variegated beauty of our diverse humanity, of giving every child a chance, of fulfilling the promise that if you work hard, you fulfill the good life for yourself and your children, that a child's outcome is not based on their parents income.

None of this will be easy. Times are tough. Those who traffic in bigotry and xenophobia and division are trying to flood the zone. They're trying to weaponize despair; they are trying to wear us down. They want us to give up. We must never give up. We must never give in. Here's the thing that I know about evil. And I say this not demonizing anybody, even my political opponents, but I'm talking about the moment that we are in. Evil always goes too far, therefore it contains within itself the seed of its own destruction.

Ultimately, truth will triumph. Love and justice will win if we faint not. Besides, who are we to give up. Every now and then when I feel like giving up, I think about my parishioner, John Lewis. When we think about the Civil Rights Movement, those victories feel inevitable when in fact they were quite improbable.

John Lewis had no reason to think that he could win crossing that Edmund Pettus Bridge with brute force under the color of law on the other side of that bridge, but he kept on marching. By some stroke of grace mingled with human resilience and determination, he not only crossed the bridge, but built a bridge, and a kid growing up in public housing crossed that bridge into the United States Senate.

I keep thinking about that kid and his kids, because the thing even mortal enemies have in common is we all want the best for our children. And the spiritual work we must do in this moment is to remind ourselves, not only in our public rhetoric, but through our public policy, that my children's success is tied to my neighbor's success.

As I close, and nobody believes a Baptist preacher when he says as I close. I'm inspired by the memory of my late father. He was a preacher and a junk man. Monday through Friday, he picked up old cars and lifted them onto the back of a rig mechanism of which he built himself. I don't know how he did it without an engineering degree or degree in physics, and that's how he took care of his family. But on Sunday morning, the junk man became the preacher man, and the man who lifted broken cars during the week, lifted broken people and told him that they were somebody. My dad discovered strength in the broken places of power made perfect in weakness.

I'm convinced that we can lift the broken even as we climb. We can heal sick bodies. We can heal the wounds that divide us. We can heal the land. We the people can do it, but we must do it together, so don't let them wear you down. Keep the faith and keep looking up.

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