Building an affordable economy: A three-legged stool strategy

Key takeaways

• Americans are getting squeezed by the rising costs for everything from housing to health care to child care.
• An affordability agenda to address this squeeze can be framed as a three-legged stool built on basic economic principles of enhanced supply, direct subsidies, and competition policy.
• Policy recommendations include rolling back tariffs that raise prices, clearing barriers to building more housing and clean energy, subsidizing child care, and promoting competition in industries ranging from health care to food processing.

Polling consistently shows that American households are deeply concerned about affordability or cost-of-living issues. These concerns typically focus on basic necessities — such as housing, health care, child care, and groceries — that Americans feel are absorbing ever larger shares of their income, leaving less room for discretionary spending and saving.

Data on consumer spending reveal the validity of some of these concerns. Figure 1 shows that price of health insurance has consistently outpaced average inflation since 2000, while housing payments (principal and interest) have done so since 2021 (rents are not shown in the figure but have long outpaced average inflation). Figure 2 shows that the share of spending absorbed by these basic necessities has risen accordingly.

Figure 1: Health insurance premiums, mortgage principal and interest payments and overall inflation, normalized to 1 in 2000

Note: Health insurance premiums are the employee component for family coverage from KFF and Kaiser/HRET annual  Employer Health Benefits Surveys. Housing prices are principal and interest payments from the National Association of Realtors. Overall inflation is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Consumer Price Index.

Figure 2: Change in expenditure share on health care and shelter

Note: Bars show the change in expenditure in percentage points relative to the year 2000 from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey.

With the glaring exception of the current administration’s sweeping tariffs that are raising prices on imports — consumer passthrough is estimated at this point to be in the range of 60-80 percent[1] — policymakers across the political spectrum and at all levels of government have broadly been elevating and supporting ideas to enhance affordability. These include ideas to increase affordable housing supply; subsidies or price controls for rent, health care, and child care; and policies to make markets more competitive.

This area of policy analysis can be challenging for economists. Macroeconomists are comfortable thinking about price growth — that is, inflation — but have less to say about the price levels of individual goods or services. While microeconomists study prices at a more granular level, they often view prices as sending important signals and are quick to point out that jamming those signals with, say, price controls, can be counterproductive.

Another way in which economists historically think about affordability is in terms of the real purchasing power of paychecks and incomes. That is, we are more prone to think about incomes relative to prices (Y/P) than prices in isolation. This makes good economic sense as an equal percentage increase in prices and incomes has no impact on affordability in real terms. However, it is not how most people tend to internalize the problem. As recent research by Stefanie Stantcheva has shown, people tend to credit themselves for wage or income gains but believe price increases are imposed on them by outside forces.[2] This means that even when a price increase is matched by a wage gain, people end up feeling worse off.

Even so, the affordability squeeze facing Americans is real. In this brief we outline three ways in which policy-oriented economists can provide useful insights to address this problem. First, we offer some thoughts on basic economic principles that should undergird an affordability policy agenda. Second, we offer a policy framework designed to help us think about and derive policies responsive to existing affordability challenges. Third, we provide examples of policy ideas that we believe should be considered and potentially developed that fit within our framework and should help enhance affordability.

Some basic affordability economics

Affordability policies should achieve their goals of making key goods and services less costly without generating unnecessary distortions to price signals or economic production. We do not argue that markets are perfectly efficient, with prices allocating resources towards their optimal use, but we do maintain that price signals are important, and policymakers must be mindful of efficiency and signaling tradeoffs when considering policy interventions.

Rolling back tariffs: The most straightforward and surefire way to lower costs is to reduce the arbitrary and broad-based tariffs that are jacking up consumer prices and distorting economic production. By rolling back tariffs, policymakers can deliver on a promise to reduce prices on day 1.

Making it faster and cheaper to build: In their recent hit book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson persuasively argued that an overhang of government permitting, zoning, and other such procedural sludge make it much slower and more expensive to build in the U.S. today than in other countries or time periods.

“Abundance” principles have come to the fore, and we agree with Klein and Thompson that there is a (thick) crust of sludge which — while providing rents (i.e., excess profits) to insiders — pushes up costs for most Americans and should be removed. However, below this crust of plainly problematic policies and procedures, many regulations offer real benefits that need to be balanced. For instance, although some environmental, worker safety and consumer protection laws may be excessive, many have societal benefits that justify their costs.[3]

Consumer subsidies in unconstrained markets: Providing subsidies to consumers is a tempting one-size-fits-all solution to affordability issues. But it works best in settings where supply is elastic enough to accommodate the increased demand. In supply-constrained markets, subsidies primarily result in higher prices with a diminished net-of-subsidy effect on affordability (but a big price tag for the government).

Combining consumer subsidies with policies that make it faster and cheaper to build can be effective if they are sequenced correctly. By this we mean, first expand supply through streamlining reforms to allow for faster, less expensive production, then subsidize demand to address affordability. Get the sequencing backward and prices will spike over the short run.

Competition policy: Economists love competitive markets as much as Americans love apple pie. And for good reason: Preventing harmful consolidation and enacting pro-competitive policy will lower prices, raise quality and improve economic efficiency. So, too, will polices that help entrepreneurs and small businesses enter markets and grow their companies without being blocked or otherwise thwarted by powerful incumbent firms.

Price controls: Economists generally oppose government price controls because they can jam market signals that incent producers to expand supply. However, in some markets such as housing, even the most aggressive policies to expand supply operate on a medium-to-long-term horizon, leaving open the question of how to address voters demands for immediate relief.

Faced with this challenge, policymakers have sometimes turned to price controls, such as rental control in housing markets. Such policies carry a significant risk of unintended consequences. By limiting prices that landlords can change in the future, they reduce incentives to build more housing today, thereby working at cross purposes to the affordability objective.

That said, there is at least a conceptual case for targeted, time-limited price controls focused on existing properties with carve outs for renovations (and any new building). Incumbent landlords who have earned excess profits from supply restrictions have their rents constrained, while rentals in new buildings can be priced at market rates. However, even carefully designed and targeted policies in this area can pose political-economy concerns: Investors in new buildings may worry that limited rent controls will be expanded and extended, and thus hold back on prospective investments.

The three-legged affordability stool

The basic economics of affordability can be likened to a three-legged stool made up of enhanced supply, direct subsidies, and competition policy.

1. Enhanced supply: While many regulations have societal benefits that justify their costs, removing procedural sludge that makes it too slow and expensive to build in this country would over time significantly increase the supply and lower the cost of the goods and services that constitute the affordability crisis.
2. Direct subsidies: In at least three cases — housing, health care and child care — taking down inefficient and friction-inducing barriers will not fully ease affordability constraints. Direct subsidies are needed for low and sometimes middle-income households to afford these goods and services at market rates.
3. Competition policy: In sectors like health care and food production, among others, insufficient competition pushes up prices and reduces choice, all while generating excess profits for existing companies.[4] Enacting pro-competitive policy can promote affordability, increase choice and make the economy more efficient.

The three-legged stool provides a policy framework for interventions in the affordability space, but it is equally important to avoid policies that push the wrong way. The sweeping tariffs imposed by the U.S. this year, for example, are raising prices rather than lowering them. Similarly, reducing the supply of renewable energy works against affordability goals.

An inherent challenge to affordability policies is that increasing the supply of undersupplied necessities like housing doesn’t happen overnight, though people want relief “now.”  Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions as it can take years to build out what is currently under-supplied. But there are a few considerations that should guide policy.

First, the need for speed provides an extra rationale for permitting reform and addressing the other sludge that slows down construction. The well-worn — and truly impressive — tale of how the collapsed I-95 bridge in Philadelphia was replaced in days instead of months is an instructive case study of “abundance” principles in action.

Second, where physical constraints can be reduced, they should be. Manufactured and modular housing are good examples, as they can be built much faster than on-site units.

Third, and far more experimental, we should learn from the supply shortfalls that wreaked so much havoc during the pandemic and consider policies to address negative affordability shocks through public reserves or private inventory requirements. Clearly, these measures wouldn’t work for housing and child care, but they could work for oil and refined products (gasoline, diesel); critical minerals and rare earths; and necessities like pharmaceutical drugs (including vaccines), medical equipment, and baby formula. Of course, mandated stockpiling is a short-term solution to an emergency. Ideal policy would be responsive to short-term crises but also support long-term capacity development and price stability. 

Affordability policies

Here we sketch out some ideas in policy areas of housing, health care, child care, groceries and energy, drawing on the three-legged stool framework. We avoid granular detail for now, and list a set of examples that are consistent with our economic guidelines.

Housing

The shortage of affordable housing is often the most prominent issue in affordability discussions and is a primary concern for households, voters and policymakers. Recent analysis by Cristian deRitis et al[5] found that “well over three-fourths of the nation’s metropolitan areas are suffering a housing shortage.” They find that moderate-income renters face a particularly acute shortfall and note that neither the market nor the current housing policy toolkit is structured to adequately address this shortage.

Land-use reform (aka upzoning) and permitting reform: Easing rules that currently restrict the density of housing needed in certain communities is widely viewed as an important part of the solution to the shortfall of affordable housing. Zoning policy is highly localized, so one policy idea is to condition the federal government’s provision of resources to subnational governments on upzoning.[6] A milder form of this type of intervention would be to give an advantage to states and localities that bid for federal support when their bid includes some degree of zoning reform. A tougher version would be to condition regularly flowing grants, such as transportation grants, on zoning reform.[7]

We note that the proposed bipartisan ROAD Act (Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream to Housing Act of 2025), which has made some initial progress in the Senate, emphasizes legislative initiatives to reduce common zoning restrictions, such as minimum parking facilities and land-use rules restricting multifamily buildings.

Abundance-type permitting reforms have been underway for some time in numerous cities and states, including New Rochelle,N.Y.; California; Oregon; and Florida, and other localities that are recognizing the value of reducing such barriers. Actions include dialing back or expediting environmental reviews, default approvals to counteract agency slow-walking of necessary box-checking and standardizing zoning rules (which can differ from block to block) across larger geographic areas. One proposal we’d endorse in this space is for a new federal function to track the outcomes of these subnational programs with the goal of learning which ones are most effective, and, if they are resource-constrained and could realistically expand, provide federal resources to do so.[8]

Housing subsidies: There has long existed a significant gap between what lower-income families can reasonably afford to pay for shelter and the quasi-fixed costs to build and finance both single and multifamily homes. For this reason, affordability policy in the housing space has long recognized the need to provide subsidies for developers to build affordable units.

Various such programs are in place, including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which targets affordable multifamily housing and was recently expanded in the new budget bill. Similar measures with broader targets include Choice Neighborhoods, The Home Investment Partnerships Program, Community Development Block Grants, the National Housing Trust Fund, and the Capital Magnet Fund, and Opportunity Zones (see here for a useful explainer).

Manufactured housing: One direct supply-side solution that is growing in importance is manufactured housing. Relative to traditional home building, factory-manufactured homes, both complete and modular, are proving to be a lower cost option that is significantly improving in terms of quality. Yet its impact has been limited by two barriers: a common requirement among federal and local policymakers that manufactured homes have a “permanent chassis” (a steel foundation that makes manufactured housing more expensive and less flexible in design terms), and a lack of affordable financing, driven largely by federal policy that treats manufactured home loans as “chattel” loans. These loans finance only the purchase of the home, not the land on which the home sits (which the manufactured home owner typically does not own). In other words, they are personal loans, not real estate loans, and thereby carry less favorable terms, including shorter maturities and higher interest rates. Policymakers can ease the impediments by removing the chassis requirement and by regulating and pricing manufactured home mortgages more like traditional homes.

Our economic principles were clear that in the case of inelastically demanded goods in short supply, building out supply needs to come before demand-side subsidies. But given large expenses such as a down payment on the purchase of a single home — a particularly steep ask for groups that lack generational wealth — we also see an affordability-enhancing role for targeted demand-side subsidies. These include a first-time homebuyer tax credit and housing vouchers.

Health care

Too often, for too many Americans, a devastating health shock is compounded by the crushing blow of exorbitant medical bills. Couple this with rising premiums, larger copayments and deductibles, and the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that is projected to leave an additional 15 million people without insurance, and it’s no wonder that Americans say that the affordability of health care costs is one of their biggest concerns.[9] 

Addressing this concern, at a high level, is simple: To start, we need to expand coverage to the uninsured, and to help people with inadequate coverage afford a more comprehensive plan,. We also need to address the underlying issues that make health care in the U.S. more costly than virtually every other country in the world. In practice, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and making progress on these issues will require a portfolio of reforms that address coverage and costs. 

Reversing coverage cuts: To expand coverage, the most straightforward first step is to reverse the harm from the OBBBA passed this summer. On the health care front, this would involve reversing the Medicaid work requirements that (1) pushes eligible people off coverage through laborious administrative burdens and (2) denies Medicaid to people who lose their job or have jobs where hours fluctuate sharply from month to month. It would also include reinstating the Enhanced Premium Tax Credits on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, which make health care more affordable for millions of families (including small business owners and the self-employed).[10] Under the OBBBA, these credits will expire at the end of the year. 

Medicare buy-in: A second step is to allow non-elderly Americans to buy into Medicare at subsidized rates. Medicare is the best health care system operating at a national scale. When people turn 65 and age into Medicare, research shows they experience sharp reductions in financial strain and significant improvements in access to care and health, including reduced mortality.[11] As a starting point, allowing people 50 years or older to buy into Medicare would provide the security and health benefits of this great program to millions more Americans. 

Dental, vision, and hearing coverage: Government health insurance should also expand its services to better address the affordability needs of American families. A prominent example is dental care, which is not covered by Medicare, forcing millions of Americans to choose between spending down their savings or enduring what can be debilitating tooth pain. Medicare could be expanded to offer a voluntary supplemental coverage for dental, vision, and hearing services to seniors. Medicaid programs, which currently cover these benefits in some states but not others, could be required to provide basic dental, vision, and hearing benefits. 

Reducing drug costs while promoting innovation: On the cost side, there is a strong case for expanding Medicare’s program of drug price negotiation. Drug prices balance incentives for innovation with affordability and access to care. We should promote innovation through investments in basic research and by improving the efficiency of drug testing and approvals. Medicare received authority to negotiate prices for some drugs under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. We can increase access and reduce costs by having the government negotiate prices for a broader set of drugs, and potentially cap drug prices in private markets in relation to Medicare’s negotiated rates. 

Enhancing competition: We should also address health care prices through a more robust competition policy. Over the last 20 years, massive consolidation in hospital markets has raised costs and reduced choice, while not improving and often harming the quality of care. Health insurance and physician markets have experienced similar trends. We need to provide antitrust enforcers with the authority and resources to prevent further harm from anticompetitive practices, including mergers of nonprofit hospitals, roll-ups by private equity firms and anticompetitive contracting practices.  

Financial assistance: Even with these reforms, there will be families that fall through the cracks. To protect families burdened by unpayable medical bills, we need to strengthen hospital financial assistance, regulate debt collectors and remove medical debt from credit reports which raises consumers’ borrowing costs and reduces credit access.  

Child care

For families with young children, finding and paying for child care is a significant source of stress and financial strain. In some places, expecting parents need to put their names on wait lists months before their child is born, and still may not receive a slot. And child care costs are staggering: They have been growing faster than inflation (Figure 3). A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reported that sending one child to daycare for five years had a median cost of $44,000 in the U.S. In the most expensive counties, the median cost is above $100,000 (Figure 4). This is unaffordable for many young families who are in the lowest-earning years of their careers.

Figure 3: Child care prices and overall inflation, normalized to 1 in 2008

Note: Center-based child care is provided in non-residential settings; home-based care is provided in a regulated home-based setting or residential unit (from the National Database of Childcare Prices). Overall inflation is Consumer Price Index for Urban Households (from the BLS). The chart starts in 2008 because that is the first year data for child care prices is available.

Figure 4: The median cost of five years of center-based child care by county 

Note: The cost of five years of child care is calculated as the total cost for one child at the market rate for the years leading up to kindergarten, including one year of infant care, two years of toddler care, and two years of pre-school. Prices are based on 2022 survey year and adjusted to 2024 dollars using the CPI-U for daycare and preschool. The source is the National Database of Childcare Prices. 

The high cost of child care reflects the basic economic realities of the business, and there is limited scope for reducing it. Child care workers are already among the lowest paid in the economy, and most facilities operate at the minimum staffing levels necessary to meet licensing requirements and ensure quality care. Indeed, the long waitlists reflect the fact that the sector is operating on a shoestring without any excess capacity to absorb fluctuating demand. Faced with this reality, the only feasible way to make child care more affordable is through a combination of government subsidies that lower the out-of-pocket cost for families and the direct provision of child care by the government at discounted rates. 

Direct subsidies to families: The most straightforward way to address the affordability of child care is to directly provide subsidies to low- and middle-income families. For example, the proposed Build Back Better Act included a sliding scale for child care subsidies: Families earning less than 75 percent of their state’s median income would pay nothing, while families up to 250 percent of the state median income would pay no more than 7 percent of their income for child care (with copays increasing gradually between these income levels). Currently, the Child Care and Development Fund provides limited funding to states to help low-income families afford child care, but only about 15 percent of eligible children receive a subsidy.[12]  Expanding this system would be a natural way to increase access to affordable child care. Relative to other markets, such as housing where land availability and regulations restrict supply, the supply of child care services should be elastic enough (over the medium run) to accommodate the increased demand without putting undue upward pressure on prices.

Head Start expansion: Head Start and Early Head Start provide free early childhood education to low-income children, funded by the federal government and delivered through public, private, and nonprofit organizations. Expanding access to Head Start could provide relief for low-income families, while supporting educational development and freeing up capacity at non-Head Start providers. In the Build Back Better proposal, a provision for enhanced payments to Head Start was designed as a fallback for states that did not opt into the direct subsidies. 

Universal pre-K (UPK): Enacting universal pre-K would help address child care costs while boosting educational outcomes, with the biggest effects for children from low-income and otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds. UPK could be designed as a voluntary, free program for all 4-year-olds, with potential to expand to 3-year-olds over time. Child care could be provided in the parents’ setting of choice, including public schools, Head Start programs or child care providers.

Reimbursement and regulation: The challenges in finding child care slots reflect providers’ limited margins and a lack of capacity to absorb natural, often unanticipated fluctuations in demand. Raising reimbursements would provide incentives for facilities to hold some excess capacity, making it easier for families to find suitable child care close to home. Higher payment rates could also be used to reward quality and incentivize the provision of high-need slots. In some states, there may be opportunities for regulatory streamlining, but these opportunities are limited, as most of the regulations are necessary to ensure safety and quality.

While we focus on the affordability benefits of child care reforms, by bridging the gap between what young families can afford and the cost of high-quality child care, these polices generate broader societal benefits. Quality child care has demonstrated effects on child development, especially for disadvantaged children. And evidence shows that quality child care also enables parents — predominantly mothers — to more quickly re-enter the labor force, allowing them to move more quickly up the career ladder and obtain more financially- and personally-rewarding careers.

Other affordability challenges

There are, of course, other goods and services that are regularly cited as posing affordability challenges, including groceries, energy prices, and higher education. As noted, our intention is not to provide granular policy guidance on all items on the affordability list, but to provide a framework for policymakers who want to help ameliorate the problem. To that end, in this section, we briefly raise some challenges and tradeoffs invoked by two other goods whose expense is troubling to many Americans: food and electricity.

For years before the pandemic, grocery prices rose more slowly than other prices. In the five years before COVID hit, for example, grocery prices in the CPI rose 0 percent while an index of all other prices rose 10 percent (see Table 1). But since then, grocery prices have outpaced non-grocery prices, likely explaining the public outcry.

Table 1: Cumulative price growth, pre- and post-pandemic

Source: CPI from the BLS. Author’s Calculations.

Policy interventions to lower grocery costs are inherently challenging because the government has much less direct involvement in this sector relative to, say, health care, wherein federal and state governments account for about half of spending.[13] From the consumer-side-subsidy bucket, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) program plays a sizable role in paying for food for low-income households, and the government’s role could be extended through changes to eligibility and the benefits formula as well as through, say, a universal free school lunch program.[14]

Some analyses suggest insufficient competition may be keeping food prices higher than they would be otherwise. In 2021-2022, the Biden administration argued that meat packing, and poultry and pork processing are highly concentrated industries, wherein a handful of dominant producers control large shares of the market, and that they took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to boost their margins (large food retailers also had elevated margins over this period).[15] But industry margins have since returned to normal levels and grocery inflation has slowed. Still, helping smaller, independent producers enter the market, as was the purpose of a now-rescinded Biden executive order, could generate more competition, greater supply, and lower price pressures.

One interesting idea in this space would be to try to introduce a version of a Mexican voluntary initiative wherein grocery retailers are asked to control prices on a basket of basic food items. The program has achieved wide compliance with all of Mexico’s large retailers, who receive some benefits for participation, including exemption from food tariffs and certain regulations. It is unclear whether large American retailers would voluntarily join the cause (Walmart’s Mexican branch does comply). Given the challenge of finding policy solutions to this part of the affordability agenda, the idea is worth exploring.

Energy prices, specifically electricity prices, have also recently been added to the affordability agenda. Like groceries, electricity prices have accelerated and, as the figure below shows, outpaced the rest of the index.

Figure 5: Electricity prices v. non-electricity prices, 12-month moving average, normalized to 1 in Jan. 2020

Note: CPI-U: Electricity from CUSR0000SEHF01, BLS. CPI-U: All Items Less Electricity is calculated by removing electricity component from CPI-U: All Items.

Affordability in this space should be guided by two simple principles and one necessary reform. The first principle is an all-of-the-above approach to increasing energy supply, with a prominent rule for renewable sources. The second is that large, wealthy energy users, such as artificial intelligence data centers, should not be allowed to raise prices for “innocent bystanders,” including households and small businesses. The necessary reform is to clear the way for faster and much more efficient distribution and transmission of electricity.

Regarding expanded supply, during the Biden years, as economic columnist Catherine Rampell reported,[16] the nation was producing record amounts of both traditional and renewable energy sources. In violation of the do-no-harm principle, the Trump administration is aggressively shutting down renewable production. This is a particularly consequential mistake given how the increased role of wind and solar energy is setting the marginal price at a period when electricity demand is growing quickly, thanks to demand from AI and electrical vehicles.

Improving transmission and storage is also a critical component of electricity affordability. In both cases, these constraints have contributed to increases in electricity prices, even as the supply of renewable energy was starting to ramp up. Transmission reform requires the building of more high-voltage lines as well as connecting grids across the country, which in turn requires streamlining approval processes.

Finally, narrowly targeted tax policies or contractual agreements should be applied to ensure that data centers don’t raise electricity prices for consumers in places where data centers dramatically increase electricity demand. Framing this as affordability policy puts it at the intersection of good policy and good politics. It can also help solve the timing problem, as revenue from these polices can be immediately refunded to households, while the effects of the expedited transmission reform kick in over time.

Conclusion

There are, of course, many more consumer goods and services that contribute to the affordability challenge faced by households today. Our goal here is not to be exhaustive but to sketch out the economic tradeoffs invoked by affordability policies, to introduce a three-legged framework for addressing the affordability squeeze, and to provide a few high-level policy thoughts in key areas. Given the public’s strong demand for policy relief in these and other areas, it is no surprise that politicians and candidates are aggressively elevating affordability issues. As we are likely to see a lot more of this emphasis, our hope is that other economists also take up this mantle and contribute to our understanding of useful — and not so useful — policy interventions to help address this affordability challenge.

Footnote

[1] Short-Run Effects of 2025 Tariffs So Far, The Budget Lab, September 2, 2025.

[2] Why Do We Dislike Inflation?, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2024.

[3] SIEPR: The Abundance Agenda - Fireside Chat Bharat Ramamurti and Kate Gordon

[4] Dean Baker’s ideas on patent reform fit comfortably in this bucket in terms of reducing rents and levelling the competitive playing field. Patents and the Abundance Agenda, CEPR, Mar 31, 2025. 

[5] Bringing the Housing Shortage Into Sharper Focus, Analysis, July 2025. 

[6] One concern is that wealthy areas may have no problem turning down federal resources that would require them to open up land-use in their areas.

[7] Economist Edward Glaeser leans into this tougher version: “States with high-price, low-construction counties would have to figure out how to overrule local zoning codes themselves or lose federal transportation funding.” This Is How to Fix the Housing Crisis, The New York Times Opinion Guest Essay, Sept. 2, 2024.

[8] Shroyer et al (2025), provide a detailed description of a broad set of housing affordability interventions underway at the subnational level.  Importantly, the measures they review "can be generally implemented through administrative or regulatory action — without needing new legislation." Winning the Census Executive Actions Governors Can Take to Boost Population Growth by Increasing Housing Supply, Searchlight Institute. 

[9] Americans Continue to View Several Economic Issues as Top National Problems, PEW Research Center, February 20, 2025. 

[10] How Cuts to the Insurance Marketplaces Will Harm Entrepreneurs, Briefing Book, August 4, 2025. 

[11] The Great Equalizer: Medicare and the Geography of Consumer Financial Strain, Working Paper, January 31, 2021 and Does Medicare Save Lives?, NBER Working Paper Series, November 2007.

[12] Child Care: Subsidy Eligibility and Use and State Waiver Requests Related to New Program Requirements letter, GAO U.S. Government Accountability Office, January 30, 2025. 

[13] National Health Expenditures 2023 Highlights. Federal and state/local health care spending accounted for 48 percent in 2023.

[14] Because increased SNAP benefits increase the demand for groceries and not supply, research has looked at the question of whether such increases raise grocery inflation. Some studies have found small positive effects, but others have not (one study found a supply response). In 2024, SNAP spending (about $100 billion) accounted for 4 percent of the $2.5 trillion spent on food consumption.

[15] Recent Data Show Dominant Meat Processing Companies Are Taking Advantage of Market Power to Raise Prices and Grow Profit Margins, The White House, December 10, 2021 and FACT SHEET: The Biden-⁠Harris Action Plan for a Fairer, More Competitive, and More Resilient Meat and Poultry Supply Chain, The White House, January 3, 2022.

[16] The secret both parties want to keep about U.S. energy, The Washington Post, January 25, 2024.