Why does everything cost so much more — and what, if anything, can government do about it without making things worse?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
The housing crisis is a supply failure made worse by federal neglect. Congress should fund a large-scale affordable housing construction program — modeled on the postwar public housing boom — and mandate that communities receiving federal transportation funds allow multifamily housing near transit. Tenant protections, including national rent stabilization, are necessary to prevent the supply surge from benefiting only developers and landlords.
The 4-million-unit housing deficit requires both more supply and demand-side relief. Federal grants should incentivize states and localities to legalize density — accessory dwelling units, missing middle housing, transit-oriented zoning — while moderate rent assistance fills the gap for households squeezed now. Housing supply reform is one of the few economic issues where left and right agree on the core diagnosis: we built too little for too long.
The housing shortage was created by government, not the market. Zoning laws, permitting delays averaging 18-36 months, environmental review mandates, and union-scale wage requirements have made homebuilding ruinously expensive. The solution is deregulation: pre-approved building plans, by-right permitting, state preemption of exclusionary local zoning, and elimination of regulations that add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a new home.
The 2025 tariff regime — the broadest since the 1930s — imposed a de facto tax on American consumers averaging $1,000-$2,400 per household in 2025, with the burden falling hardest on lower-income families who spend more of their income on goods. Congress should reclaim its constitutional authority over trade policy and repeal tariffs on consumer goods that have raised prices on clothing, appliances, electronics, and food without producing the promised domestic manufacturing renaissance.
Targeted tariffs on strategic industries — steel, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals — can serve legitimate national security and supply chain resilience purposes. Blanket tariffs on consumer goods, however, are price increases paid by American families, not foreign governments. A trade policy that distinguishes strategic sectors from everyday consumer goods would reduce the inflationary impact while preserving the tools for legitimate economic security goals.
Free trade has hollowed out American manufacturing, made supply chains dangerously dependent on adversary nations, and suppressed wages for working Americans who compete with foreign labor paid a fraction of U.S. rates. Tariffs are a necessary instrument of rebalancing — painful in the short term but essential to rebuilding domestic productive capacity. Critics of tariffs have been predicting catastrophe for two years; the economy has proved more resilient than advertised.
Corporate consolidation in the food industry — a handful of companies controlling meat processing, grocery chains, and farm supply — has enabled systematic price gouging. The FTC should investigate and break up food sector monopolies. Congress should restore SNAP benefits cut in the 2025 reconciliation bill; food security is the most direct cost-of-living intervention available. A national school meals program removes the highest-anxiety line item for struggling families.
Food inflation is driven by multiple factors — energy costs, weather events, supply chain disruption, and corporate consolidation all play measurable roles. The FTC has authority to investigate price-fixing and should use it; simultaneously, reducing energy costs and improving domestic agricultural productivity address the underlying supply constraints. Universal school lunch is a high-return investment with demonstrated outcomes.
Food prices rise when energy costs rise — it is that simple. American agriculture runs on diesel fuel and natural gas for fertilizer. The fastest way to reduce food costs is to produce more domestic energy. Corporate consolidation in food processing deserves scrutiny, but price controls and antitrust overreach will disrupt supply chains and reduce the investment that drives agricultural productivity.
Utility bills are up 12% in 2025, with 124 million Americans facing rate increases — disproportionately in low-income households that spend the highest share of income on heat and electricity. The solution is accelerated deployment of cheap renewables, aggressive weatherization of homes to reduce demand, and low-income utility assistance (LIHEAP) that Congress has systematically underfunded. Electricity demand is rising faster than supply because of data centers — regulators should require them to pay for the grid capacity they consume.
Energy affordability requires both supply expansion and grid modernization. Natural gas has been the primary driver of electricity price stability in recent years; premature closure of gas generation before replacement capacity exists raises rates and risks reliability. The Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy tax credits are already driving record renewable deployment — maintaining them avoids stranding billions in private investment while building toward lower long-run costs.
The energy price spike is a direct consequence of Biden-era energy restrictions — paused LNG exports, cancelled pipelines, drilling moratoriums, and regulatory barriers that suppressed domestic supply. The U.S. sits on the world's largest recoverable oil and gas reserves. Unleashing domestic production would lower energy costs for consumers and reduce OPEC's leverage over the American economy. Subsidizing expensive renewables raises electricity rates; abundant natural gas lowers them.
The core of the affordability crisis is that wages have not kept pace with costs for the bottom half of American workers. Congress should raise the federal minimum wage — last increased in 2009 — to at least $17 an hour, indexed to inflation so it never falls behind again. Strengthening workers' right to organize gives them market power to bargain wages toward the actual cost of living. The problem is not that prices rose; it is that wages were too low before prices rose.
Real wages have actually recovered for most workers since the 2021-2022 inflation peak — but the gains were uneven, and workers in housing-intensive metro areas face a structural mismatch between local wages and local costs. Targeted measures — childcare subsidies, earned income tax credit expansion, and student debt relief — address the cost squeeze more directly than broad wage mandates that price out entry-level workers in lower-cost markets.
The minimum wage debate misunderstands what sets wages: competition for workers, not legislation. The tightest labor market in fifty years produced the fastest real wage growth for lower-income workers in decades — without a federal mandate. Mandating $17 federally prices out workers in rural Alabama the same as urban Seattle, where market wages already exceed $20. State and local variation reflects actual local cost differences; federal mandates erase that signal.
Healthcare is the fastest-rising major cost for American families and is uniquely American in its dysfunction — we spend twice what peer nations spend and cover far fewer people. The ACA enhanced subsidies, now threatened, have cut premiums for marketplace enrollees. The 2025 reconciliation bill's Medicaid cuts will shift millions of uninsured emergency visits onto a system already pricing that uncompensated care into premiums for everyone else. Single-payer is the only structural solution to a system built on cost-shifting.
Healthcare cost control requires action on the drivers: hospital consolidation that eliminated competitive pricing, drug pricing that charges Americans 2-3× what other nations pay, and administrative overhead that consumes 30 cents of every healthcare dollar. Extending ACA subsidies prevents an immediate premium spike for 22 million enrollees. The IRA's drug negotiation authority is a start — expand the number of drugs eligible for Medicare negotiation and allow private insurers to use the negotiated prices.
Healthcare costs are high because markets are not allowed to work. Certificate-of-need laws protect hospital monopolies from competition; state insurance mandates require expensive coverage even where consumers want bare-bones plans; FDA drug approval timelines keep cheaper generics off the market for years. Deregulation — direct primary care, association health plans, health savings accounts, and interstate competition — creates the competitive pressure that actually lowers prices.