Life Must Remain the Measure

What Are You Worth?

We measure corporate profit to the penny. We price buildings, vehicles, stocks, patents, and commodities. We put a market value on nearly everything.

So what is a human being worth?

I reject every one of those answers.

That is the foundation everything else in this post stands on. If you take one thing away, take this: no paycheck, credit score, zip code, title, diagnosis, or circumstance has ever measured what you are worth. Those things measure economic relationships. They do not measure you.

Look at the family on the hill in the image above: a man in a wheelchair, a mother, a child, a grandmother, a construction worker, and the dog who loves them all. None of them is worth more than the others. None of them can be ranked by income, by usefulness, or by how comfortable they make a city council feel.

This country was founded on the claim that “all men are created equal” and endowed with an unalienable right to life. We have spent nearly 250 years widening that promise to include the people it first left out. It was never meant to stop at the edge of a tent, a hospital bed, or a jail cell.

The $7.25 Message

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009. Congress has not raised it in more than sixteen years, while inflation has steadily eaten away its buying power.

Work full time, 40 hours a week, every week of the year, and that floor produces $15,080 before taxes.

Many states and cities have raised their own wages above that. But roughly 20 states still sit at the federal floor.

The minimum wage was created as a protection, not a price tag on a life. But look at what that floor communicates. A person can give their full working week to a productive business and still be unable to afford rent, nutritious food, transportation, or healthcare.

Economists argue over how wage increases affect hiring and prices, and those questions deserve honest study. But they do not erase the moral question underneath:

Should a full week of work give a person a real chance at a stable life?

If the answer is yes, then wages cannot be judged only by what they cost employers. They must be judged by whether the people earning them can live.

When a Person Becomes an Expense

On a balance sheet, workers are recorded as an expense. That's an accounting tool, and it has a purpose.

The danger comes when an accounting category starts shaping how we see the people behind it.

A worker is not a cost to be minimized. A worker is a human being with children, aging parents, dreams, relationships, and a body that wears out. Their time is finite. Their years cannot be bought back.

When a system rewards cutting the cost of people above everything else, and nothing protects them, you get wages that cannot sustain life, hours that grind people down, and families one emergency from collapse.

We should never confuse which one matters more.

When Ownership Outranks Existence

Ownership has a place. Property rights can bring stability, encourage investment, and support innovation.

But ownership is not an unlimited moral claim.

This is not an argument against commerce. It is an argument about order. We created economic institutions to serve life. We have to ask, honestly, whether life is now being made to serve them.

When Financial Extraction Depends on Human Vulnerability

That brings us to private equity, institutional ownership, and the financialization of the things people need to live.

When an institution extracts financial value from something people cannot reasonably live without, where does that value come from?

Financial value is being captured while human well-being is being drained.

The deeper danger is that we get conditioned to accept it as normal.

And eventually, the financial performance of institutions gets more protection than the people who sustain them.

The system never has to announce that human beings are worth less. It only has to keep making decisions in which their well-being counts for less.

That is the collective devaluation I'm warning about.

Not that every investor intends harm. Not that every corporation exploits its employees. Not that all investment is destructive.

But that our economic structures can reward extracting returns even when those returns come with worsening conditions for workers, families, communities, and the other species we share this planet with.

So we have to ask whether the gains we celebrate are real improvements in human life, or just successful transfers of wealth and bargaining power from those who have the least choice to those who have the most.

A society that keeps rewarding the accumulation of assets while accepting the decline of human living conditions has forgotten the purpose of its own economy.

If a business model cannot produce acceptable returns without compromising human dignity, access to necessities, or basic economic security, then question the business model, not the worth of the people it affects.

Hiding the Outcome Instead of Fixing the Cause

Here is where the stakes become concrete.

On July 24, 2025, the President signed an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets.” It pushes to expand civil commitment, meaning involuntary institutional treatment, for people experiencing homelessness with serious mental illness or addiction. It directs federal agencies to seek reversal of court decisions that limit commitment, ends federal support for Housing First programs, ties homelessness aid to mandatory treatment, supports encampment removal, and allows data from homelessness programs to be shared with law enforcement.

Supporters argue this restores public order and gets people who cannot care for themselves into treatment. Some people truly do need intensive care, and families who have watched a loved one deteriorate on the street understand that pain.

But look at what the order actually does to the visible outcome versus the underlying cause.

The cause is a country where wages stopped tracking the cost of living, where housing became an investment instead of a home, where healthcare and mental health care are rationed by price. The order does not touch wages. It does not build housing. It arrives alongside deep Medicaid cuts that shrink the very treatment it promises. Mental health and civil rights advocates warn it will lead to more policing, more institutionalization, and less access to housing, and that it moves away from Housing First models with strong evidence behind them.

In other words: the evidence of failure gets moved out of sight, while the machine that produces it keeps running.

A society can become extremely efficient at managing hardship without becoming any better at preventing it.

The Wrong Measuring Stick

Here is how you can tell when a government has started measuring the wrong thing. Ask what it celebrates.

Even the count itself is slipping out of view. The federal report on the January 2025 homelessness count is usually published in December. It came out on May 29, 2026, about five months late, after public pressure. When it arrived, the gender breakdown that past reports included had been removed, and the press release credited the decline to “sanctuary cities,” a phrase the full report itself never used.

Whatever you think about homelessness policy, that should concern you. Data that is late, trimmed, or spun cannot guide anyone. A cleared encampment is not a housed person. A shorter list is not a healthier nation.

Why Hiding Outcomes Makes a Worse United States

This is not only a question of compassion. It is a question of what kind of country we become.

A nation that hides its outcomes is a nation that has stopped correcting itself. And a nation that cannot correct itself declines.

The Other Lives We Share This Planet With

Equal Value Is Not a Slogan. It's a Standard.

Hold every policy up to this:

• =A person who cannot work is not worth less than a person who can.
• =A person without a home is not worth less than a homeowner.
• =A person living with a disability is not worth less than someone without one.
• =A person struggling with addiction or mental illness has not lost their humanity.
• =The species that share this Earth do not become meaningless because they can’t be turned into profit.

Not every harm was deliberately designed. Policies have unintended consequences. Institutions chase legitimate goals and miss the damage. But once the harm is visible, continuing without fixing it is a choice. And choosing to hide it is a worse one.

So we must judge our systems not by what they promise, but by what they produce:

The Signposts Home

In the image, a wooden signpost points toward the things that actually make a nation strong. These are not slogans. They are the directions we have to walk if life is our measure.

Each of these can be measured honestly. How many people are housed. How many can see a doctor. How many workers can live on what they earn. How clean our water is. If we publish those numbers every year, on time and in full, Americans will be able to see exactly who is keeping their promises.

My Commitment

As President, I will hold my own administration to the measure I am asking you to hold everyone to:

• ✓Publish every federal count of human need on schedule and in full, with no trimmed categories and no political spin in the release.
• ✓Judge every program by whether people’s lives got better, not by whether a problem was moved out of view.
• ✓Treat housing, healthcare, and a livable wage as the foundation of public safety, not as rewards for compliance.
• ✓Refuse to sign any policy that treats a human being as a problem to be removed.