Voters are rightly angry about the cost of living. Republicans want that anger aimed at Democrats, on the theory that Democratic policies drove up prices and Democratic proposals will only make them worse.
No. Look at the record.
Start with inflation. The consumer price index increased an average of 5% a year during the Biden presidency, compared with 1.9% during the first Trump term and 2.9% so far during the second. Those are real numbers. Democrats do not dispute them.
But the loaded vocabulary does most of the work. The casual reader who hears “5% under Biden” is being asked to draw a causal arrow from the Biden White House to the grocery bill. The arrow does not survive scrutiny.
Both parties contributed to the initial burst of inflation through their 2020 spending. The bipartisan CARES Act and the December 2020 omnibus alike helped drive demand while the pandemic disrupted production and supply chains. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021 delivered transfer payments to households battered by the pandemic and aid to states and cities facing fiscal collapse.
That was a recovery response to a once-in-a-century demand shock, not a discretionary spending spree. Inflation followed because global supply disruption, pandemic dislocation and the war in Ukraine were already in the pipeline. The alternative was a depression.
The Federal Reserve held interest rates at zero through the recovery, accommodated the fiscal expansion, then misjudged how long supply bottlenecks would persist and fell behind the curve. Democrats in 2021 urged the central bank to keep rates low. That was the mainstream economic consensus at the time, not a fringe view. The Fed’s misjudgment was the Fed’s own.
The first Trump term’s 1.9% inflation did not arrive by magic. It was purchased with bipartisan pandemic spending in late 2020 that the Biden team inherited and continued. The record is bipartisan. The blame is not.
Housing tells the same story. Housing prices rose 5.3% a year on average during the Biden years, compared with 2.7% during the first Trump term and 3.7% so far in the second. Mortgage rates, set by the bond market rather than the White House, moved far more than any underwriting tweak did.
The Biden team loosened mortgage underwriting so families locked out of homeownership could qualify. That did not create the housing crisis. Decades of underbuilding did.
The bipartisan failure to build is the story. One administration’s adjustments to mortgage guidelines are a footnote.
Acceleration in home prices during the Biden years reflected decades of pent-up demand meeting a supply shortage. The first Trump term was not a housing miracle. It was a starvation diet, with mortgage credit kept tight while a generation of younger families remained priced out.
The metro breakdowns tell the story more clearly. Over the last year, housing prices grew significantly faster in Boston at 4.4%, New York City at 4.4%, Minneapolis at 3.7% and Los Angeles at 3.4% than in Dallas at 1.9%, Atlanta at 1.4%, Houston at 0.3% and Tampa at negative 0.6%.
The Sun Belt has finally caught up on supply. The Northeast, West Coast and parts of the Midwest remain starved by local zoning boards and permitting regimes that block the construction voters need.
Read the numbers without the partisan framing and the conclusion is plain: supply-constrained metros see faster price growth regardless of which party runs city hall. New York and Los Angeles are not more expensive than Houston and Tampa because of one party’s housing platform.
Tenant protections in progressive cities—rent stabilization and “just cause” eviction rules—are part of a broader housing policy framework. They are among the few things standing between working families and outright displacement.
The principal drivers of new construction costs in those metros are restrictive zoning and exclusionary land-use rules, not wage mandates alone. It costs about 2.8 times as much to build an apartment in California as in Texas, according to the RAND Corp. Some affordable housing projects in California cost more than $1 million per unit.
That is not a single-policy scandal. The cost stack includes prevailing-wage mandates, California’s CEQA review process, its construction-defect liability regime, its impact-fee structure and trade-union work rules. Federal prevailing-wage mandates for federally supported projects are one input among many.
And prevailing wages keep construction workers in the middle class. Requiring prevailing wage on projects that touch federal dollars is the policy of a country that still believes construction is a dignified job.
Democrats want to raise the $7.25 federal minimum wage to $15 or higher. Most Democratic-run states already impose minimum wages of at least $15. The proposal would extend existing standards to states with lower wage floors, including Texas, Iowa and New Hampshire at $7.25, and Ohio at $11.
Businesses in those states already operate alongside employers in higher-wage states. The proposal would end the race to the bottom that has hollowed out the wage floor in Republican-run states.
Yes, some businesses will pass some costs on to consumers. That is a feature, not a bug, of a policy that puts money in working families’ pockets. The alternative is a permanent underclass earning less than a living wage. That is more expensive than any price adjustment.
Gasoline prices have risen amid the war in Iran. The inflation-adjusted average across the second Trump term is $3.43 a gallon, compared with $3.89 during the Biden years and $3.27 during the first Trump term.
Read those numbers straight. The first Trump term enjoyed the lowest real gasoline prices because oil markets were calm. The Biden years coincided with the global energy shock created by the Russia-Ukraine war. The second Trump term is colliding with the war in Iran.
The driver of higher gas prices is geopolitics and a refinery base that has been allowed to shrink, not the energy policy of the previous occupant. The Biden Administration canceled some leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, restricted new offshore drilling in portions of the Gulf and paused new leasing on federal lands. Those decisions had marginal effects on production. The leases represented a small fraction of total U.S. output, and the industry was capital-constrained even where leases were available.
California gasoline costs $6.37 a gallon. Diesel costs $8.40. Critics sneer at this as a climate-policy utopia. Read it instead as the price of leading an energy transition while other states free-ride.
California’s cap-and-trade program, low carbon fuel standard and fuel taxes are part of a long-running effort to price carbon and reduce transportation emissions. They internalize costs that federal policy still refuses to price. Refineries have closed for a mix of regulatory, market and structural reasons.
That is not proof that climate policy is a luxury. It is proof that the transition has a price, and that someone has to pay it.
Electricity costs are rising amid data-center demand and the broader post-pandemic price level. Average residential retail rates are 33.6 cents per kilowatt-hour in California, 30.5 in Massachusetts, 29.9 in New York, 28.3 in Rhode Island and 25.2 in New Jersey. They are 15 cents in Florida, 13.8 in Nebraska, 13.7 in Tennessee and 13.1 in Utah.
The states with the lowest rates have different fuel mixes, regulatory structures and demand profiles. The coastal states have retired older fossil and nuclear plants in some cases, built renewables, faced transmission constraints and absorbed the costs of integrating new energy sources at scale.
Today’s low rates can be tomorrow’s stranded assets. Cheap legacy generation is not a permanent energy strategy.
So what are Democrats actually proposing on affordability?
Expanded child tax credits and housing assistance. More subsidized housing investment. Clean-energy tax credits. Continued health-care reforms. A higher federal minimum wage.
Each proposal targets a pressure voters actually feel: child care, housing, energy, health care and wages. The cumulative effect is to put more money in working families’ pockets while constraining price growth in targeted sectors.
The Affordable Care Act accelerated consolidation in some segments of the health-care market. Employer-plan premiums have roughly doubled since 2010, rising at about twice the rate of inflation. Those facts matter.
So do the facts Republicans omit. The ACA expanded coverage to tens of millions of previously uninsured Americans. Premium growth slowed in some post-ACA years relative to pre-ACA trends. Before the law, insurers could deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. The broader forces driving U.S. health-care costs predate the ACA and extend across the developed world.
Premiums doubled. Without the ACA’s risk pools and Medicaid expansion, they would have risen even faster for people the old system simply left uninsurable.
The law has design flaws. It also saved lives and expanded coverage. Both facts fit on the same page.
On tariffs, Joe Biden did vow during the 2020 campaign to repeal President Trump’s first-term tariffs and never did. Labor unions, a key Democratic constituency, supported many of them. Strategic industries argued for retaining them. That is a record of continuity, not reform.
Democrats have also proposed raising taxes on business. Corporate tax increases can be passed through to consumers in part, depending on market structure. That is a real consideration. It is not a universal veto against asking corporations to pay more.
Expecting Republicans to deliver affordability after tight mortgage credit, landlord-friendly policy, permanent wage ceilings and a tariff record that the current administration has expanded is indulging hope over evidence. Expecting Democrats to deliver it is at least aimed at the cost-of-living pressures voters actually name.
The party of oil leases, landlord-tenant deregulation and a $7.25 wage floor has no monopoly on affordability. It has the White House, both chambers and the gavel. Its record is now the record.
The numbers do not oblige the partisan frame.
The most expensive belief available is that the people who made daily life harder are the people best equipped to make it affordable.
