Now I Get It: Affordability is a Con

 For months, I’ve been a bit confused about “affordability,” the latest Democrat meme. Then, early last week, I read a piece about “affordability” and realized: “of course.” Affordability is just the Democrats’ latest excuse for giving out free stuff to their supporters, paid for by you and me. Even though I can’t find the article that I read, I wrote about “affordability” on my Substack.

If you look at the Congressional Progressive Caucus “New Affordability Agenda” you realize that Affordability is not just about free stuff, but something else. “Affordability” is about politicians trying to fix things they screwed up already. It’s a lame effort to paper over the failure of government programs. Let’s go down the CPC’s bullet points.

• Government program to “directly manufacture generic drugs.” What could go wrong?
• Eliminate “the corporate stranglehold over crop production and [crack] down on price fixing by big grocery store chains.” Sen. Warren (D-MA): Stop the Kroger/Safeway merger!
• Make housing cheaper with “downpayment assistance for first-time homeowners” and “rental assistance.” Hey, sports fans! Remember the mortgage meltdown? That was all about gubmint subsidies to low-income borrowers. Know how to make housing affordable? Stop subsidizing it and stop liberal climate and zoning scams.
• “To make utility bills cheaper… crack down on for-profit utilities price gouging consumers.” Hey, sports fans: how about canceling the Green New Deal and the Climate Change Scam!
• “To make childcare cheaper… provid[e] federal funding for states and localities[.]” Federal funding for childcare? What could go wrong?
• To lower gas prices, how about a “Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax [to curb] profiteering by oil companies.” I know: how about “drill, baby, drill” in the teeth of opposition from the dentist’s lobby.
• And so on.

Do you realize, dear progressive friends, that your affordability agenda is proof of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s fascist doctrine that politics is all about sticking the enemy and gifting your friends?

Enemy? Big Pharma, corporations, grocery chains, utilities, Big Oil.

Friend? Helpless victims of all of the above.

Experts agree that if you parrot the doctrine of a Nazi jurist it means you are Literally Hitler. Don’t you agree, progressives? Of course, experts also agree that the only difference between Soviets and Nazis is in the style of their mustaches. Did you know that the only reason that Hitler did not have a luxurious mustache like Stalin was that German soldiers in World War I had to crop their mustaches so they could wear gas masks? Stalin didn’t serve at the front because “a medical examiner ruled Stalin unfit for service due to his crippled arm.” Bless his heart.

I admit that both parties do the “affordability” dance. The reason that “Trump signs executive order expanding retirement account access for workers” is that the government’s pension program, Social Security, is a failure, and Trump is doing his own version of “affordability” to paper over the failure and gin up support in the ordinary middle class for the midterms.

The real name of the game is “prosperity.” But prosperity is a product of the market economy, and nobody sees it coming. Usually, the experts and politicians try to stop it:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced “legislation that would enact a reasonable pause to the development of AI to ensure the safety of humanity.”

 

Hey Bernie! Remember when the Brit Col. Sibthorp campaigned against railways?

[He] began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

That was nothing. In the 1950s average Americans were barreling without permission down Interstate highways at 70 mph in 1.5 ton Chevrolets to see the USA. Experts agreed that it would end in disaster, just like fossil fuels half a century later.

At least both Bernie and AOC are both in favor of politicians “flying private” on Fight Oligarchy Tours.

Let me be clear. The Bernie-AOC AI pause has nothing, nothing to do with Sen. Warren helping to tip Spirit Airlines into bankruptcy by blocking its merger with JetBlue.

Fact is that experts are usually wrong in their predictions about new technology. In the 1990s experts thought that the Internet would “only be for technicians,” that people would never trust it for online payments, and online shopping would not succeed.

Nevertheless, our modern age is the age of the Great Enrichment, when the average real per capita income went up by 30 times, or 3,000 percent. There’s never been anything like it.

How did it happen? By accident. Some yahoo started mechanizing textiles. Another yahoo invented the steam engine. Electricity and magnetism were so amazing that Hegel reinvented philosophy.

Finally, the science caught up, and Claude Shannon determined that information is “surprise.”

So really, our modern prosperity is all a surprise, an accident. Until “affordability” destroys it.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/05/now_i_get_it_affordability_is_a_con.html