"I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people who own their homes."

Needless to say, as the Donald's scrambles about seeking housing affordability "solutions", we'd rather suspect that higher house prices are not quite what the economic doctor ordered. That is to say, during the last 55 years the number of hours an average worker needed to put on the clock in order to afford a median price US home has doubled—rising from 7,000 hours in 1963 to more than 14,000 hours or seven standard work-years worth of earnings in 2025.

Accordingly, you can't find a more graphic proof that Washington has been sending "affordability" reeling in the wrong direction for decades on end than what is depicted in the graph below. It cuts through the noise of the Fed's inflated dollars, which are not even comparable from decade to decade, let alone over a half-century. Instead, it puts housing prices and the wages needed to purchase a home in the plain language of hours on the employer's clock.

Yet after five decades of Washington hanging the carrot of homeownership farther and farther in front of the mule, the Donald proposes to push prices still higher. Apparently he believes that homeowners check the market value of their castles frequently and will therefore praise the man in the Oval Office whenever "the number go up".

We're not sure that's even true as a political matter. That's because the soaring prices of existing homes have been affordable only because mortgage rates were artificially suppressed for decades. But even that's no longer always the case because literally tens of millions of homeowners who may need to move or want to trade-up are now locked into their existing houses: They simply can't afford to abandon the super-low mortgage rates on their existing abode in favor of a new mortgage on a different home at current market rates (see below).

In any case, it's just plain economic nonsense to think that the currently required 14,000 work hours to buy a median home is copacetic and that even higher home prices are just the ticket.

Number of Hours An Average Workers Needs To Purchase A Median Price Home 

Actually, the relentlessly rising line in the graph above tells you all you need to know about the "affordability" issue. To wit, everywhere and always central bank money-printing causes asset prices to rise far faster than incomes, thereby inexorably shifting nominal societal wealth to asset holders and especially highly leveraged speculators.