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EJ Antoni on Affordability: ‘Keep Your Foot Down on the Throttle, Mr. President’
The new buzzword today seems to be affordability. Suddenly, the entire media has woken up to the fact that Americans are in a cost-of-living crisis, something that has been true for several years now.
Of course, the mainstream media had no interest in discussing the issue when Joe Biden was in office, but now they view it as a cudgel to beat President Donald Trump.
The irony here is off the charts. The liars in the media, which is probably most of them if we’re being serious, are trying to pin on Trump a crisis that began literally years before he took office.
Recall that these left-wing stooges dutifully reported that inflation was “transitory,” then said it was Vladimir Putin’s fault, then said it was somehow a sign the economy was great, etc.
In other words, the media refused to acknowledge the American people’s financial pain, despite many food and energy prices rising by a third or more, credit card interest rates hitting about 30%, the monthly mortgage payment on a median price home doubling, and health insurance premiums hitting stratospheric levels.
Of course, these were all reasons why the electorate overwhelming decided to send Trump back to Washington, to fix the mess created by the radical left’s big-government agenda. Only now, as if awaking from some kind of drunken stupor, does the media acknowledge what American families have known for years: we’re in a cost-of-living crisis.
Of course, while the left-wing apparatchiks in the media gleefully report on the people’s pain today during a Trump presidency, then conveniently ignore both how the previous administration got us here and the fact that things are getting better.
Let’s throw some numbers out to illustrate each of these two points.
Imagine a family with both adults working and each with a weekly paycheck equal to the average worker’s weekly earnings. Under Biden, prices rose so much faster than incomes that it was the equivalent of the family taking more than a $4,300 pay cut to their combined annual income.
Conversely, during this second Trump term, earnings growth has outpaced inflation and that same family has seen their inflation-adjusted annual income rise almost $1,700.
This illustrates two things. First, the average American’s situation is clearly improving today. Things were getting worse under Biden and now they’re getting better under Trump.
But secondly, the average American still has not been made whole as it were. People fell so far behind under the previous administration that they still haven’t recovered to where they were in, say, 2019.
So, we’re moving in the right direction but there’s still a long way to go, and those two facts are not mutually exclusive.
It’s a testament to the president’s economic agenda that in a mere nine months or so he has effectively undone one-quarter of the damage caused by the radical left during the Biden years. And it’s worth examining exactly how he did this because it’s clearly a winning formula and will help enlighten us on how to clean up the rest of the mess created by the radical left’s big government agenda.
First, we’ve seen significant reductions in some areas of federal spending and the federal workforce. In fact, the Trump administration has managed to reduce federal payrolls every single month since taking office with the number of bureaucrats now at the lowest level in more than a decade, while government purchases declined in the first half of the year.
There’s also been a tremendous effort to cut bureaucratic red tape, removing burdensome overregulation that has been holding back the productive private sector.
And with the Trump administration’s pro-American energy policies, domestic energy production has set multiple record highs this year.
We’ve also seen reductions in taxes on both personal income and business investment, further spurring on economic activity and incentivizing hiring and wage increases. It’s also worth noting who is being hired and getting wage increases.
Thanks to the Trump administration’s enforcement of immigration law, we’ve seen the number of native-born Americans with jobs rise more than 2.6 million over the last 12 months, while the number of jobs among foreign-born workers has fallen slightly.
This is exactly the opposite of what we saw under Biden, where much of his last year in office was marred by annual declines in the number of jobs among native-born Americans while all net job growth went to foreign-born workers.
In fact, for the entirety of the Biden administration, the annual percentage increase in jobs among foreign-born workers exceeded that of native-born Americans, but Trump has flipped this. Now, for the first time in more than four years, the growth rate for jobs among native-born Americans exceeds that of their foreign-born counterparts.
This is an important point because it illustrates that America isn’t just some economic zone wherein all people and jobs are interchangeable, but she’s a nation, and Trump has chosen to prioritize that nation’s people.
For Americans, it’s a totally different situation if two million jobs are added to the economy but they all go to other people versus two million more Americans being employed.
So, the winning formula has been something like this: reduce government spending, taxation, and regulation, encourage reliable energy production, and support a healthy labor market for Americans. These things have undoubtedly helped us make progress in alleviating the cost-of-living crisis.
How do we go the rest of the way and fully dig out of this hole? We double down on this successful agenda.
The administration should go full throttle on its efforts to right-size the government, including ramping up the efforts of DOGE and supercharging the push for deregulation.
That’s especially true for housing, where we desperately need to cut red tape and let homebuilders bring more supply to market, thereby putting downward pressure on prices. But it’s not just burdensome regulation on home construction that needs to be corrected. It’s also ancillary factors like financial regulations that affect the mortgage market, which is inseparable from the housing market, that need to be overhauled.
All these places where government has its tendrils are performing suboptimally and getting the government out of the way will allow the private market to self-correct and answer the demand for more homes.
Similarly, for the sake of American’s pocketbooks and especially considering the huge electricity demand from A.I., we need to flood the market with more generation capacity. Take all the clean coal power plants out of mothballs. Cancel all future solar and wind projects. Fast track all natural gas and nuclear projects on the drawing board.
While we’re at it, cut the red tape for the oil sector as well to bring prices at the pump down even more, giving consumers additional relief. Lower energy prices will put downward pressure on prices on all other prices throughout the economy.
All the while, keep cutting government spending and payrolls, get additional tax relief done for individuals and businesses, and keep enforcing immigration law.
This has been the winning formula for the Trump administration to get earnings growth to outpace inflation. If you want more of these positive results, you must do more of what caused them.
Keep your foot down on the throttle, Mr. President, and you’ll not only make life more affordable, but more affordable than ever.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post EJ Antoni on Affordability: ‘Keep Your Foot Down on the Throttle, Mr. President’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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