The White House proposes to increase demand for housing and add more obstacles to its supply: a recipe for failure.
The Biden administration often seems to forget some of the basic principles of economics. In Biden’s world, the market is no longer a place where supply and demand meet. It is a strange morality play in which greed and goodness fight for supremacy, and only the government’s generosity or its firm hand can ensure that Americans get their full bag of chips.
This economic confusion was nowhere better illustrated than in Biden’s speech in Las Vegas last week, during which he reiterated several proposals for lowering housing costs that he had previewed in his State of the Union address.
The fundamental problem with housing today is that federal, state, and local regulations constrict supply, which drives up prices. Biden’s backwards solution is to subsidize demand by handing out more government money to buyers, renters, and developers. These subsidies would further drive up prices, waste public money, and drive home ownership even farther out of reach for many Americans.
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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