Democrats Running on Affordability? Their Record Tells a Different Story

The Audacity of Running on a Record You Don’t Own

I have to be straight with you. When I started seeing Democrats position themselves as the party of affordability heading into this election cycle, I had to take a breath. I get it. Politics is politics. You point at gas prices, food prices, diesel costs, and you blame the other guy. But if you’re going to make affordability your campaign platform, you better be able to defend your record. And this record? It doesn’t defend itself.

Let me be clear before anyone accuses me of carrying water for the elephants. I’m not a partisan. Both parties have burned American consumers. This isn’t a red versus blue argument. This is a math argument.

The Biden Inflation Years Were Brutal, Period

During the Biden years, average inflation ran at 5% annually. That is not a talking point. That is the data. Yes, inflation came down before he left office. But here’s what the political class never explains to regular people: prices coming down in terms of the inflation rate is not the same as prices actually falling. Those elevated costs were baked in. They didn’t reverse. They compounded.

And how did we get there? Two culprits working in perfect harmony:

• Trump’s COVID spending opened the floodgates
• Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID rescue package poured gasoline on the fire when it was completely unnecessary
• The Federal Reserve went right along with it, printing money and calling it sound policy
• Then when inflation exploded, they called it transitory

How did that work out? We all know the answer.

Housing: What Happens When You Subsidize Demand Without Addressing Supply

The housing affordability crisis follows the same broken logic. When you subsidize housing for certain buyers without expanding supply, you pull supply off the market and prices go up. It’s not complicated. It’s supply and demand, and no amount of government intervention rewrites that equation.

Here’s a number that stopped me cold. It costs 2.8 times as much to build an apartment in California as it does in Texas. Affordable housing projects in California are running more than $1 million per unit. Wage mandates, regulatory burdens, permitting delays. All of it drives construction costs through the roof, and then politicians wonder why nobody can afford a roof.

Some markets went parabolic during COVID because people were fleeing high-cost, high-regulation blue states. That’s a supply-demand shock too, and it’s a direct consequence of policy choices.

Energy Prices: The Numbers Speak for Themselves

If you genuinely believe the Democratic Party has been good for energy affordability, I’d ask you to look at your electricity bill. Here are the actual residential retail electricity rates across the country:

• California: 33.6 cents per kilowatt hour
• Massachusetts: 30.5 cents per kilowatt hour
• New York: 29.9 cents per kilowatt hour
• Rhode Island: 28.3 cents per kilowatt hour
• New Jersey: 25.2 cents per kilowatt hour
• Florida: 15 cents per kilowatt hour
• Nebraska: 13.8 cents per kilowatt hour
• Tennessee: 13.7 cents per kilowatt hour
• Utah: 13.1 cents per kilowatt hour

That is not a coincidence. Blocking pipelines, blocking drilling, shutting down nuclear plants, piling CAFE standards onto vehicle manufacturers that raise the cost of every car on the lot. These are policy choices with real price tags attached, and working Americans pay those bills every single month.

What This Means for Your Financial Planning

Here’s the bottom line. Regardless of which party holds power, the structural forces that have driven up your cost of living over the past several years are not reversing quickly. As you think about your financial position, you need to plan around:

• Elevated baseline prices that are not going back to pre-2020 levels
• Energy costs that vary dramatically depending on where you live and work
• Housing expenses that reflect years of policy-driven supply constraints
• Inflation risk that both parties have demonstrated a willingness to create when it suits them politically

You are what your record says you are. Both parties have a lot to answer for, and the American consumer has been paying the tab.