The squeeze on American households is a policy squeeze. It runs through the fuel pump — motor fuel up 27.9 percent over the year because the Strait of Hormuz is contested — and through the mortgage bill, where the 40-year Freddie Mac rate has climbed from 6.34 percent to 7.28 percent in a single year. Michael Brendan Dougherty reads off those same aggregates and concludes the public is whining about the wrong things. In his National Review column Let Them Eat Aggregates, he argues the people complaining about $20 burritos and $80 fill-ups should be told to economize, not treated as facing a political problem. He lines up behind Irving Kristol’s defense of Jimmy Carter’s austerity moralizing — that the real sin is voters wanting leaders to address prices rather than lecture them on home economics. He’s wrong, and the wrongness is arithmetic.
Here is the arithmetic Dougherty lays out and then refuses to follow. A 3 percent mortgage from 2019 or 2020 on a $400,000 loan costs about $1,686 a month in principal and interest. The 40-year Freddie Mac rate hit 7.28 percent last week, up from 6.34 percent a year ago. The same loan at the new rate is $2,737. That is a 62 percent jump in the monthly payment for the same house, the same family, the same income. The national median home price is up 59 percent since 2020, which means a comparable house today would run $636,000 and a monthly payment of $4,352. Most people aren’t getting raises of 100 percent. They aren’t getting raises of 30 percent.
Dougherty knows this. He wrote the numbers himself. Then he pivots to Andrew Kolvet’s college student complaining about a $20 burrito, and to Ben Shapiro telling that student he is “doing life wrong.” That is the move. Take the macro misery, find a young person complaining about the smallest visible symptom, hold them up as the symbol, and instruct the audience that the messenger is the problem.
The fuel number tells the same story with the same villain. Motor fuel is up 27.9 percent over the year, because the Strait of Hormuz is contested and America ships everything on trucks. That isn’t a guacamole problem. It is the predictable bill from a war the administration started on the bet that the result would be quick and cheap. It wasn’t. Groceries are 42 percent above early 2020. Some of that is post-pandemic normalization. Most of it is the energy and interest-rate feed-through — diesel for the trucks that move the food, working capital that costs more when the policy rate is where it is.
Dougherty is right about one thing, and it isn’t the Kristol line. He is right that yelling at a college student about a DoorDash burrito is a dead end for political analysis. It is. But the answer to that observation is not “therefore the prices are fine.” The answer is that the political class has a duty to name the actual drivers — Iran policy, monetary policy, the failure to build housing — instead of staging a 1979 re-enactment with conservative commentators in the lead.
What to build: a foreign-policy posture that doesn’t bet the household budget on a quick Hormuz resolution. A monetary regime that prices shelter as the largest line item it actually is, instead of treating 7.28 percent as a non-event. A housing supply policy that treats the 59 percent national price rise as a national emergency on par with the energy shock — permitting reform, federal financing, units in the metros where nominal prices are up 80 to 90 percent. Stop telling them to make burritos at home. Fix the kitchen.