The content is too big for 300 words, and Google Gemini was used to research this piece. This Essay was posted on 12/11/2025.
The new political distraction is affordability. Both political parties look at higher consumer costs, and both parties argue that they are the only ones with a solution. Unfortunately, their solutions come up short.
First, what is affordability? It is neither a measure of inflation nor a measure of prices. It is a measure of an individual’s ability to pay the going rate. There is an affordability problem when wages don’t keep up with prices. For example, affordability is a problem when people need to open a GoFundMe Account to pay for grocery and rent.
Republicans claim that tariffs, deregulation, and tax cuts will miraculously lower costs and fix everything. They forget that: Tariffs are one of the key drivers of consumer cost today. Deregulation may lower the cost of businesses, but the lower cost usually means more profit instead of lower prices. Historically, businesses turn lower costs into bigger profits and leave the prices alone. And tax cuts, like deregulation, end up as more profit instead of consumer gains.
Democrats in Congress are focusing on lowering the cost of healthcare by lowering drug prices and extending Obamacare incentives and making housing more affordable with government investments. These measures target specific problem areas, but they don’t lower the price of coffee, and they don’t address affordability.
Why are housing prices so high? Housing price increases are largely caused by COVID. The pandemic paused the housing industry, the encouraged working remotely, and created a migration from cities to the suburbs and the country. These changes contributed to a jump in housing prices that may have peaked but won’t go away.
And, why is coffee expensive? Changing weather conditions in Brazil and Vietnam have greatly encumbered the two largest coffee producers and resulted in US coffee shortages and higher prices that won’t go away soon. We need to look at the root causes, if we want to get price inflation under control.
Prices, in general never bounce back to their original baseline. Our economy works best when there is modest inflation of around 2%. When overall prices actually decrease, the economy suffers from a depression with massive layoffs and way too many homeless people. So, what is the solution to affordability? Our economic system needs to react to inflationary prices by raising wages enough to offset the inflation. So, why is everyone complaining about affordability when the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 per hour since 2009?
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