Even as the economy shows deeper signs of strain, with tariffs driving up Cost of living in Louisiana and recession warnings flashing from economists across the country, working people are trapped in a system that has been failing them for years. The instability of 2025 has only pulled back the curtain further, exposing a reality that many have long understood: the economy was never designed to lift everyone up. It was built to concentrate power, protect wealth, and leave the rest to fend for themselves.
New federal trade policies have triggered fresh waves of market volatility. Consumer confidence has collapsed, plunging 32% since January — the steepest drop in decades.
In Louisiana, the pressures are relentless. Housing Cost of living in Louisiana continue to climb, insurance premiums spiral out of reach, and basic necessities are eating away more and more of every paycheck. Across the board, survival is getting harder. For too many, it already was.
Housing: A Rigged Game
In New Orleans, the average price of a home now tops $300,000, a staggering 30% jump over just five years. Wage growth during the same period has been anemic, with incomes increasing by a mere 10%.
Rents have followed suit. A typical two-bedroom apartment now demands over $1,500 a month, while countless workers in tourism, healthcare, and education struggle to earn even $35,000 a year. In a recent article entitled “The Human Cost of New Orleans’ Rising Rent,” Big Easy Magazine reported that approximately 31,200 households in New Orleans pay more than half their income in rent.
Adding insult to injury, home insurance premiums have surged by 63% since 2021, driven by disaster profiteering and industry pullouts.
Housing, once a cornerstone of stability, has been transformed into another high-stakes market rigged for those already on top, deepening the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans.
Insurance: A Safety Net Torn Apart
For Louisiana families, insurance has become another unaffordable tax on existence. The average home premium now nears $11,000 a year, and insurers, newly emboldened by the repeal of consumer protections, can drop policies at will.
New tariffs on construction materials are expected to drive rates even higher, hitting Gulf Coast residents hardest.
Where insurance was once a shield against disaster, it has become a hammer, forcing families to pay more for less security amid Louisiana’s growing insurance crisis.
Healthcare: Profits Over People
Healthcare in Louisiana mirrors the nation’s collapse of the social contract. The average annual premium for family coverage now exceeds $24,000. Even in a lower-Cost of living in Louisiana, many families are paying more than $1,200 a month just to maintain basic coverage.
Louisiana ranks last in the country for health outcomes, with 10% of adults still uninsured and racial disparities continuing to undermine access to preventive care.
Pharmaceutical companies continue to thrive, proving that in America, illness remains a lucrative business opportunity rather than a humanitarian crisis to solve.
Environmental Injustice: Living and Dying in Cancer Alley
No statistic captures Louisiana’s environmental injustice better than the communities of Cancer Alley.
Along this stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, over 150 petrochemical plants have pushed cancer rates far above national averages. Respiratory illnesses are rampant. Toxic chemicals like ethylene oxide exceed federal safety limits by two to three times.
Federal enforcement weakened further in 2025, after critical environmental lawsuits were abandoned, leaving these communities with little recourse.
The poison in the air is no accident. It is the consequence of generations of political calculation and the ongoing environmental justice struggles in Louisiana.
Wages: Running to Stand Still
Across the country, and especially in Louisiana, workers are doing more and earning less.
Adjusted for inflation, real wages are lower today than they were in 1979. In Louisiana, nearly half the workforce earns less than $15 an hour, while corporate CEOs enjoy compensation packages 399 times larger than the people who make their businesses possible.
In a system built on exploitation, hard work has been reduced to an act of survival, not advancement — fueling the fight for a living wage in Louisiana.
Auto Insurance: A Crisis on the Roads
Drivers in Louisiana are bearing the highest auto insurance Cost of living in Louisiana in the nation, with the average premium soaring to nearly $4,000 a year. In some areas, rates are even higher, driven by a perfect storm of litigation Cost of living in Louisiana, high accident rates, insurance fraud claims, and deregulation.
However, many of these factors have been exaggerated by the insurance industry to justify relentless price hikes. Location, credit scores, age, and marital status all unfairly inflate premiums, disproportionately punishing low- and middle-income drivers.
For many working-class families, reliable transportation is essential — yet increasingly unaffordable. Some are forced to underinsure or go without coverage altogether, risking financial devastation from even minor accidents.
In a state where public transportation remains limited, the ability to drive safely is not a luxury. It is a lifeline — one that is being priced out of reach.
The Cost of Living: The Squeeze Tightens
Since 2021, the Cost of living in Louisiana has surged by 20.5%, outpacing wage growth and hollowing out household budgets.
Basic utilities have become a cash cow for corporations. Entergy Louisiana raised rates again in 2025, while posting $11 billion in profits.
Prescription drug prices remain a significant burden despite modest reforms, while Pfizer and other pharmaceutical giants continue to post record revenues. Water and sewer costs are creeping upward, squeezing working families further.
According to Bankrate, Louisiana has the highest credit card debt burden in the nation, which is unsurprising given the insane insurance premiums along with low wages and massive inflation. The average credit card debt per household in Louisiana is $5,796 while the average household income of $6,598. In other words, banks are seeing record profits on the backs of hard-working Americans. With credit card debt rising and disposable incomes shrinking, building financial stability has become almost impossible for many Louisianans.
Corporate Profits and “Greedflation”
While early pandemic-era supply chain disruptions created real bottlenecks, many corporations continued raising prices even after those disruptions eased. Rather than passing savings along to consumers, companies preserved higher prices — padding their profit margins at a time when working families could least afford it.
Research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that corporate markups grew by 3.4% in 2021 alone, suggesting that markup growth accounted for more than half of inflation that year. Other studies reinforce this trend. The Economic Policy Institute reported that corporate profits surged precisely because companies exploited temporary supply chain issues to justify price hikes. Meanwhile, research from the Center for Economic Policy Research concluded that large firms leveraged shortages to increase prices, contributing up to 23% of total U.S. inflation during 2021.
For Louisiana families, these inflated prices hit especially hard. Grocery bills, utility Cost of living in Louisiana, and basic goods all climbed higher not solely because of scarcity, but because corporations saw an opportunity to turn global disruption into record profits.
Inflation, in large part, wasn’t just inevitable. It was engineered.
Income and Wealth Inequality: An Expanding Chasm
The wealth gap in New Orleans has reached staggering proportions. The income inequality ratio between the richest and poorest residents nears 8 to 1.
The racial wealth divide is even more stark, with white households holding 13 times more wealth than Black households.
In today’s Louisiana, economic mobility is no longer an opportunity. Rather, it is a myth reserved for a privileged few.
The Real State of the Union
Corporations are thriving, and political donors continue to shape policy to protect their fortunes.
But the people who keep this country running — the workers, the caregivers, the neighbors rebuilding after every storm — are being left behind.
Across Louisiana, and across the nation, a new kind of resistance is taking root. Community mutual aid efforts in New Orleans are growing stronger. Workers are organizing. Communities are finding ways to protect one another when the system will not.
The real state of the union is not recovery, and the record highs reached by the stock market the last few years has been symbolic of the financial health of those on Wall Street, not Main Street.
It is a reckoning — one long overdue — and it is being led by those who refuse to be erased.
