Republicans Can Win on Affordability

National Review Online

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

‘Affordability” may be today’s political buzzword, but the truth is that it is always a top political issue. When we talk about inflation, or unemployment, or GDP growth, what we are mostly concerned about is whether people can afford the things they need and want.

 

When someone in your life has trouble paying his bills, he may profit from advice about hard work and thrift. Maybe he should learn his way around the kitchen. But mistakes on his part do not erase valid complaints about an economy and government that make paying those bills harder; economizing by households is not a substitute for better policies; and political parties and movements cannot set themselves up as the voters’ tutors.

 

Conservatives and libertarians, more than anyone else, should understand all the ways modern government makes it harder to make ends meet. They should share and express the voters’ anger, and try to direct it toward constructive channels rather than the dead ends of big-government liberalism or, worse, “democratic socialism.”

 

If sticker prices are high, that is in part because the Federal Reserve has expanded the money supply too much during the last six years, and has been reluctant to admit or correct its mistakes. The Fed is not going to exercise so much monetary restraint that the price level falls, but it ought to take its inflation target more seriously than it has done. Conservatives ought to insist on it — and write into law a tighter mandate for the central bank to produce the macroeconomic stability that is the Fed’s only justification for existing in the first place.

 

The high cost of housing, particularly in economically booming regions of the country, is a significant challenge for young people starting their working lives and thinking about starting families. The chief culprit is overregulation via zoning, building codes, and rent controls, particularly in some deep-blue jurisdictions. Conservatives should call attention to that overregulation and, where appropriate and sometimes in coalition with nonconservatives who see the potential of markets to address this problem, legislate against it.

 

The expense of health insurance eats into paychecks. Conservatives should advocate lifting regulatory barriers to the sale of renewable insurance policies that protect owners from the risk of high medical costs. Additionally, the higher-education cartel has become an expensive chokepoint to economic opportunity. While the Republicans’ big tax bill last year made some progress in reforming student-loan programs, much more can and should be done to dismantle that cartel, from opening up accreditation for new institutions to holding old ones accountable for running diploma mills.

 

Republicans face political challenge in this election year, even beyond being in charge of the White House and the Congress at a time of economic discontent: two of their major policies — the on-again, off-again prosecution of the Iran war and President Trump’s mania for tariffs — are contributing to high prices. The economics buttresses the geopolitical case that our chief near-term objective with respect to Iran should be the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump’s failed experiment of trade wars against the rest of the world, which has cost $900 per household this year, should be abandoned.

 

Many Republicans will, unfortunately, balk at breaking with Trump on trade. But they ought at least to refrain from dismissing voters’ unhappiness with prices as a mere Democratic talking point or attributing it to their being spoiled kids. Unless, that is, they want the voters to conclude that keeping Republicans in office is unaffordable too.