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, and it needs large-scale federal investment, not just deregulation. A large-scale affordable housing construction program, modeled on the postwar public housing boom, would add supply faster than waiting on local zoning fights to resolve on their own. Communities receiving federal transportation funds should be required to allow multifamily housing near transit, paired with tenant protections like national rent stabilization so new supply doesn't just benefit developers and landlords.
The roughly 4-million-unit housing deficit needs both more supply and demand-side relief, and this is one of the few economic issues where left and right actually agree on the diagnosis. Federal grants that incentivize states and localities to legalize density — ADUs, missing-middle housing, transit-oriented zoning — address the supply side directly. Moderate rent assistance fills the gap for households squeezed right now while that supply comes online, since new construction takes years to affect prices.
Government, not the market, created the housing shortage, and deregulation is the fix. Zoning laws, permitting delays averaging 18-36 months, environmental review mandates, and union-scale wage requirements have made homebuilding ruinously expensive. Pre-approved building plans, by-right permitting, and state preemption of exclusionary local zoning would cut tens of thousands of dollars off the cost of a new home without new federal spending.
The 2025 tariff regime, the broadest since the 1930s, functions as a de facto tax on American consumers that falls hardest on lower-income families. Households absorbed an estimated $1,000-$2,400 in added costs in 2025, with the burden falling hardest on families who spend more of their income on goods. That cost came without the promised domestic manufacturing renaissance materializing at anywhere near the scale claimed.
Targeted tariffs on strategic industries serve legitimate national-security purposes, but blanket tariffs on consumer goods are just price increases paid by American families. Steel, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals are reasonable candidates for strategic tariffs tied to supply-chain resilience. Blanket tariffs on everyday goods, by contrast, are effectively paid by American consumers, not foreign governments, whatever the stated intent.
Free trade hollowed out American manufacturing and made supply chains dangerously dependent on adversary nations; tariffs are a necessary, if painful, rebalancing tool. Free trade also suppressed wages for working Americans who compete directly with foreign labor paid a fraction of U.S. rates. Critics have predicted economic catastrophe from tariffs for two years running, and the economy has proven more resilient than that predicted.
Corporate consolidation in food processing and grocery has enabled systematic price gouging, and Congress should restore the SNAP cuts from the 2025 reconciliation bill. A handful of companies now control most meat processing, grocery chains, and farm supply, giving them real pricing power over consumers with few alternatives. Food security is the most direct cost-of-living intervention available, and a national school meals program would remove the highest-anxiety line item for struggling families.
Food inflation has multiple real drivers — energy costs, weather, supply-chain disruption, and consolidation — and the fix has to address more than one of them. The FTC already has authority to investigate price-fixing in the food sector and should use it more aggressively. At the same time, reducing energy costs and improving domestic agricultural productivity address the underlying supply constraints that consolidation alone doesn't explain.
Food prices rise when energy costs rise, since American agriculture runs on diesel and natural gas for fertilizer — that's the fastest lever to pull. Producing more domestic energy is the most direct way to bring food costs down, faster than any antitrust action would. Corporate consolidation in food processing deserves scrutiny, but price controls and antitrust overreach risk disrupting supply chains and the investment that drives agricultural productivity.
Utility bills are up sharply, hitting low-income households hardest, and the fix is renewables, weatherization, and real LIHEAP funding. 124 million Americans are facing rate increases, disproportionately in low-income households that spend the highest share of income on heat and electricity. Electricity demand is rising faster than supply partly because of data centers, and regulators should require them to pay for the grid capacity they actually consume.
Energy affordability needs both supply expansion and grid modernization — natural gas and renewables aren't actually in competition here. Natural gas has been the primary driver of electricity price stability in recent years; closing 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, and maintaining them avoids stranding billions in private investment already committed.
The energy price spike is a direct consequence of prior-era restrictions on LNG exports, pipelines, and drilling that suppressed domestic supply. The U.S. sits on the world's largest recoverable oil and gas reserves, and unleashing domestic production would lower energy costs 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 haven't 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 real market power to bargain wages toward the actual cost of living, rather than waiting on legislation alone.
Real wages have actually recovered for most workers since the 2021-2022 inflation peak, but the gains were uneven across regions. Workers in housing-intensive metro areas face a structural mismatch between local wages and local costs that a national number doesn't capture well. Targeted measures — childcare subsidies, EITC expansion, student debt relief — address the cost squeeze more directly than a broad wage mandate that can price out entry-level workers in lower-cost markets.
Wages are set by competition for workers, not legislation, and the tightest labor market in fifty years already produced the fastest real wage growth for lower-income workers in decades without a federal mandate. Mandating $17 nationally prices out workers in rural Alabama the same as urban Seattle, where market wages already exceed $20. State and local wage variation reflects real local cost differences that a federal mandate would erase.
Healthcare is the fastest-rising major cost for American families, and 2026's expired ACA subsidies made that dramatically worse for marketplace enrollees. Average premiums for subsidized ACA marketplace enrollees roughly doubled in 2026, to about $1,904 a month from $888, once the enhanced premium tax credits expired at the end of 2025. CBO estimates about 2.2 million more people will be uninsured in 2026 as a direct result, on top of the 2025 reconciliation bill's Medicaid cuts shifting more uncompensated care onto premiums for everyone else.
Healthcare cost control requires action on the actual drivers — hospital consolidation, drug pricing, and administrative overhead — and restoring the expired ACA subsidies is the fastest lever available right now. Administrative overhead alone consumes roughly 30 cents of every healthcare dollar in the U.S., far more than peer countries. Restoring the enhanced premium tax credits that expired at the end of 2025 would reverse the roughly 114% average premium increase subsidized enrollees are now facing, while the IRA's drug-negotiation authority is a start worth expanding further.
Healthcare costs are high because markets aren't allowed to work — certificate-of-need laws, state coverage mandates, and slow FDA generic approvals all suppress competition. Direct primary care, association health plans, and health savings accounts give people more choices and more control over what they actually pay for. Interstate insurance competition and faster generic drug approval would apply real competitive pressure that price controls and subsidy extensions don't.