If you even remotely follow politics or economics, you have no doubt heard the phrase "affordability" repeatedly over the past few months. Democrats have been using the affordability issue and the "affordability crisis" to hammer President Donald Trump and Republicans during this year's elections. And it has worked somewhat, with Dems winning most competitive races on this year's ballot and Trump now going on a nationwide tour to try and take back the affordability issue.
But lost in all the Dems' rhetoric is the fact that they don't really have any solutions to solving the affordability crisis, except for more government control and spending---which are the things that caused the crisis in the first place. "When the government is just flooding the economy with trillions and trillions of dollars, that obviously is going to make money less valuable," says Chris Talgo, editorial director for the Heartland Institute. "That is the real problem here, and I don't even know if it's possible to address that without major reforms to the big entitlement spending programs."
Talgo has written a new piece outlining five solutions to the affordability crisis, starting with increasing the supply of housing. "Aside from housing, we've got energy," he says. "There's a bunch of things that can make energy more affordable, which the Trump administration is already doing."
In addition to increasing housing and energy supply and curbing government spending, Talgo also recommends unleashing business entrepreneurship and innovation to help break the monopoly of big corporations that keeps small and start-up businesses from being able to compete.
Then there is the other issue currently in the news---healthcare. "In terms of healthcare, we need to get the government out of that system," says Talgo. "We need to return it to a free market system, so that price signals actually take over and consumers are making choices instead of third parties making them."
While Democrats will continue to rant and rave about affordability, Talgo warns it is up to conservatives to actually fix it---or the consequences could be devastating. "If we do not rectify this, we are going to have a generation of young people who will want socialism and big government," he tells KTRH. "Because they don't understand that the solution is not more government, it is less government."
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