After all, this is a massive country full of hundreds of millions of people in different stages of life, subscribing to many different political ideologies, religious beliefs, and cultural values—all fighting over temporary control of one powerful centralized state that allows the group in power to impose their values and preferred institutions on everyone else. It's not exactly a setup that breeds cooperation or unity.

But there is currently one point of agreement among nearly all of these groups: that the cost of living in the United States is getting out of hand.

This "affordability crisis," as many are calling it, wrecked Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris' bid to stay in office in 2024 and helped usher Donald Trump back to the White House. But, ten months into Trump's second term, the problem persists. And, as the off-year election results from earlier this month suggest, the affordability crisis is quickly turning back into a political liability for the GOP.

So now, both parties are scrambling to make addressing it a political priority—the Democrats to press their new advantage and the Republicans to minimize damage in the midterm elections next year. The problem, of course, is that if specific proposed solutions are part of the conversation at all, they tend to range from totally useless to disastrously counterproductive.

That's not because the causes and cures of the affordability crisis are a big mystery. It's because the current political class has little to gain and a lot to lose from targeting the actual causes of the crisis. The current setup is working wonders for them and their well-connected rich friends.

But it's important that everyone else—that is, the bulk of Americans who are the ones being ripped off by the political class—understand the actual solutions so that the politicians claiming to address it can be judged and pressured accordingly. So let's run through some of the primary policies needed to make a meaningful dent in the affordability crisis.

Housing
As I laid out in more detail last week, the soaring price of housing in this country all goes back to an artificial housing shortage that is caused by government barriers to the construction of new housing. Those barriers exist on federal, state, and local levels. They include everything from zoning laws to environmental regulations.