Donald Trump campaigned on, among other things, bringing down prices across the board for Americans.
Once back in the White House, he declared “affordability” concerns a “Democratic hoax” and more recently called it a “fake” word. Yet all the while he has thrown numerous cost-reduction ideas against the wall to see if anything sticks — or, perhaps, distracts.
Then he did something really weird. He called Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the progressive from Massachusetts he has frequently disparaged, to consult on cost-of-living ideas. This was after she gave a speech criticizing him for not doing enough, particularly on reining in housing costs and credit card rates.
As much as anything, who controls Congress after this year’s midterm elections may hinge on which candidates and party make the best argument for taming the rising cost of living. It permeates virtually every competitive House race, including two in San Diego County.
That’s been the political dynamic for some time and continues to favor Democrats. Trump is desperately trying to change that in hopes of preventing Democrats from regaining the House, where Republicans have a slim majority, and possibly flip the GOP-controlled Senate, which would threaten his agenda.
Trump promised to bring down prices from virtually the moment he took office in January 2025, but has not delivered, except around the margins.
But if he makes progress this year, that could change the equation for some of his vulnerable allies who are on the defensive, such as Rep. Darrell Issa, whose San Diego-centric Republican district was transformed from very red to slightly blue through last year’s voter-approved redistricting measure.
His opponents in the 48th Congressional District, especially leading Democratic contenders Marni von Wilpert and Ammar Campa-Najjar, have focused on the cost of living. Health care costs are perhaps the defining affordability issue for voters.
Recently, both took aim at Issa’s vote against extending Affordable Care Act tax credits, which passed the House with 17 Republicans joining Democrats. Both framed the vote in the larger context of affordability.
“After promising to lower costs, Issa has repeatedly voted to do the opposite – this time voting against the extension of ACA tax credits to lower monthly premiums for thousands of families,” von Wilpert, a San Diego City Council member, said in a statement.
“At a time when grocery prices, rent, gas and utilities are already stretching household budgets to the breaking point, Darrell Issa just voted against a bipartisan effort to extend ACA tax credits for working families,” Campa-Najjar, who has run against Issa before, said in his statement.
Campa-Najjar leaned on his personal history, saying he was raised by a single mother of modest means. “I know what it’s like to be one medical bill away from financial disaster,” he said.
Issa has been a consistent vote against the ACA for years, contending it has increased, not lowered, medical costs and is rife with fraud. He has supported alternatives such as the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act and co-authored the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act.
More broadly, Issa has backed tax cuts — many of them weighted toward upper-income groups — and reducing regulations to benefit families and businesses. He also was an author of the Save Money on Auto Repair Transportation (SMART) Act and has noted the spiking price of eggs dropped dramatically under Trump last year.
On Fox News last month, Issa said many Americans aren’t aware enough of Trump’s price-reduction efforts and that more relief will come when the president’s measures fully kick in.
“The president’s leaving more money in your pocket and driving down the growth of the cost of goods,” he said, but suggested more needs to be done.
For his part, Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, has talked about cost-of-living concerns for some time, particularly regarding high health care costs. While redistricting made his 49th District straddling the San Diego-Orange County line more Democratic and thus safer for Levin, it’s still considered competitive.
This week he introduced the SHIELD Act to make large energy users such as data centers cover their costs of intense energy use and related infrastructure.
“Families should not be forced to subsidize massive energy costs for billion-dollar companies,” he said. He cited a study by PowerLine, an organization that seeks to lower energy costs, that indicated an estimated 80 million U.S. households are already struggling with utility bills, which have been steadily rising.
He also introduced a bill this week to prevent American taxpayer dollars from being used to rebuild Venezuela’s oil infrastructure without congressional approval.
House races no doubt will be affected by many issues – increasingly aggressive and violent immigration enforcement, Trump’s authoritarian leanings, the president’s military and foreign policy adventurism and various local issues. But the economy likely trumps all.
What the president may actually do is far from clear. During his first term, for instance, he talked about an alternative to the ACA but that didn’t go anywhere. But he has continued to discuss many things, including making data centers responsible for the energy they use.
Among his other suggestions: limiting defense contractor pay and stock buybacks, capping credit card rates, reducing prescription drug costs (where he has made some progress), providing health care subsidies directly to consumers and issuing $2,000 “tariff refund” checks to low- and moderate-income people.
On housing, he says he wants the federal government to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds to drive down rates, ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes and create more incentives to build homes.
Most of that has perplexed allies and some business leaders who question whether what he is proposing will have much impact. That analysis aside, just about all of his plans are straight out of the progressive handbook — which makes the call to Warren a little less weird.
This week, Trump gave a speech riddled with false claims about the economy and lower prices that neither data supports nor the public believes, according to recent polls.
Among other things, he said grocery prices “are starting to go down rapidly.”
They’re not, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report last week. Food prices jumped in December, and increased over the previous 12 months.
A lot of people buy the same groceries every week. They tend to know when their Cheerios cost more.
What they said
The Onion (@TheOnion)
“Archaeologists: D.C. Capitol May Have Once Been Used For Legislating.”