By Kari Lake via The Daily Caller News Foundation | October 07, 2024
The dead-end hyperinflationary policies of the Biden-Harris administration have put the American Dream out of reach for many young people. I have talked to my 21-year-old daughter about this so many times that it breaks my heart.
Ruby, like so many young Americans, is doing everything right. She works hard, she saves up, but that old-fashioned notion of the white-picket fence seems to be slipping away from her grasp. Part of the reason I am running for Senate is to make America affordable again. And I know that bringing down out-of-control housing prices is the key to restoring access to the American Dream for our young people.
Per Federal Reserve data, in 1984, the median U.S. household income was $22,400 and the median home price was $78,200, or about 3.5 times the median income. By 2022, median household income had risen to $74,580, but median home prices had risen to over $433,000 — or nearly six times median income.
Elected officials owe it to our constituents to take clear and decisive action to reduce housing costs.
There has been so much focus on the role of interest rates, but the answer to bringing them back down, while hard to achieve, is fairly straightforward: the federal government needs to stop printing money we don’t have so that it can pay bills that we can’t afford. Taming that imbalance won’t be quick or easy, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods.
But there is another key element of the housing crisis that we can address quickly and effectively: a lack of skilled tradespeople. According to an analysis by Associated Builders and Contractors, the United States is short over half a million skilled construction workers. The lack of skilled construction workers combined with rapidly increasing costs of materials is creating a roadblock to building the millions of additional housing units that are needed to relieve the cost bottleneck.
Bringing down the cost of materials largely hinges on three things: reducing the price of energy and fuel, eliminating excessive regulations created by the Biden-Harris administration, and increasing the number of skilled workers available to producers. Limitations on oil-and-gas production and refining are leading to rapidly increasing fuel and energy costs that have inflated the price of building materials by tens of thousands of dollars per home.
Likewise, excessive regulation and DEI mandates being forced on producers by the Biden-Harris administration are also increasing materials and labor costs, without appreciable benefit to society in terms of reduced inequality. Lastly, the rush to send every high school graduate to a four-year college, with massive government subsidies, is draining the workforce of skilled tradespeople which both increases the cost of construction and delays additional new home starts.
Solving the first two problems is very simple. Replace President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with Donald Trump, overturn the current administration’s pointless and counterproductive executive mandates, and you are two thirds of the way there. The last step — increasing the number of skilled construction workers — is going to take more effort.
But with some simple changes in federal education funding and policy, we can turn that deficit around in a matter of just a few years by revising federal education funding and loans to stop discriminating against trade schools and technical education and support the development of a skilled workforce sufficient to meet the demands of our housing market.
First, we need to revise the guidelines for Pell grants to allow them to be issued and used for more students to attend trade and technical schools. Second, if the government is going to continue to back student loans, eligibility for those loans needs to be aggressively expanded to include more trade schools.
Currently, trade-school students can access government-backed student loans, but only if their trade school is federally accredited. Many are not. Getting the vast majority of trade schools nationwide accredited so their students have access to government-backed loans should be a major priority for the next administration and will be a priority of mine in the U.S. Senate.
Lastly, the government needs to aggressively partner with industry to expand trade school opportunities by making low-interest loans available to companies and unions to invest in new and expanded trade and technical-school facilities.
The cost to attend trade and technical schools is far less than the cost of a four-year degree, and the returns on that investment are astronomical. A few thousand dollars of up-front investment in these careers yields a lifetime of high earnings, and resultant increased tax revenues. As a result, investing in expanding our skilled workforce is responsible governance, and must be a priority going forward.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Kari Lake is a Republican running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.
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