On Friday, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen warned that “income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years.”

On Saturday, Senator Elizabeth Warren called for federal student loan refinancing, and declared: “The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it.”

On Sunday, along with a secret memo that threatened “crushing” defeats, there was the headline on the front page of the New York Times: “Black Vote Seen as Last Hope for Democrats to Hold Senate.”

Inequality: it’s all anybody can talk about ... except Democrats on the campaign trail who, with two weeks before Election Day, desperately need to turn out the very people so disproportionately affected by it – young and minority voters.

Sure, the teacher-backed Super-Pacs are hitting Republicans from Arkansas and North Carolina to Hawaii and back again for wanting to “shut down” public education. Yes, ignoring affordable housing is the stuff attack ads are made of.

But housing and education are issues of inequality that have solutions, not just stump-speech lines or YouTube-ready complaints. And if Democrats have any hope left in the midterms, they cannot be this shamefully muted on bold progressive policies that could dramatically improve the lives of voters who just happen to hold the keys to a majority of the United States Senate.

Barack Obama’s neglect on foreclosure has been well-documented. The housing crisis turned countless former homeowners into renters and, now, into would-be voters in dire straits. More than four in 10 of very low-income U.S. households have no access to subsidized housing, and are instead paying more than 50% of their income in rent, living in horrific conditions or both.

We have about as much public housing today as we did in the mid-1970s, losing 10,000 units per year, even though the U.S. population is now 47% bigger.

An easy fix would be to simply expand the stock of affordable housing, especially units available to low- and moderate-income households. And believe it or not, the Obama administration has the unilateral authority to do so, without Congress.

The National Housing Trust Fund, a program created during the second Bush administration, was never actually funded. But the National Low Income Housing Coalition believes we could end homelessness in America in 10 years if it was funded now. So what are Democrats so afraid of?

Money for the fund is supposed to come from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but their regulator – the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) – has been preventing the cash from flowing. Now Fannie and Freddie are profitable, and putting all of those profits towards deficit reduction, instead of setting aside a small portion for people who need somewhere to live.

If Democrats were serious about giving minority voters a reason to turn out in November, they would push Obama to work with the new head of the FHFA to fund affordable housing, or talk about affordable housing solutions at all. Republicans who’d inevitably oppose such a move are already planning to vote against them anyway, but minority voters who would stand the greatest benefit from these solutions apparently aren’t hearing the message.

And if liberal candidates are so afraid to align themselves with Obama, why not speak out against one of his biggest failures?

Like the housing crisis, which decimated minority wealth, the failure to tackle spiraling student debt is another blight on Obama’s already terrible economic legacy.

Over 7 million student loan borrowers are now in default. Over a lifetime, 17.5% of an individual’s wealth is lost to college loans. And it’s worse for black students, who leave college with an average of $28,000 in student loan debt, $4,000 more than the average graduate.

While education is billed by everyone from Yellen to Obama as a salve to economic inequality, their proposed solutions address only the margins of the problem, and still hinge on students owing more debt to Wall Street.

Even Warren merely calls for lower interest rates, rather than something that would address the crushing need to take on debt in the first place. Indeed, if we want to truly address inequality in education and student debt, we need to make public higher education... free.

Free school may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s far more achievable than it sounds. The group Strike Debt has estimated that free public higher education would cost $61.8 billion a year. But if you cut current education subsidies, including eliminating the $8.4 billion in Pell Grants and GI bill money that for-profit schools receive, that number drops down to only $15 billion a year.

Warren – the most progressive senator in America the most unequal nation on Earth – stumped for Democrats in tight races in Iowa and Colorado and Minnesota, pushing her debt refinancing plan and “a giant pipeline of ideas.” The crowds roared. Now imagine how they’d respond to tuition-free college, to a home they could actually afford. Imagine that instead of an attack ad. Imagine how they’d vote.

“The fight comes to you,” Elizabeth Warren told the swing voters. Democrats are fighting, alright. Now they just can’t forget who and what they’re fighting for.

Originally published by The Guardian