Source: The Heritage Foundation | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
Millions of Pennsylvanians can’t afford to buy a house today, and failed public policy is to blame.
Repeated missteps by elected officials have caused the American dream of homeownership to become more than twice as expensive in less than four years, which is why two-thirds of Americans now see that dream as permanently unobtainable.
By the end of 2020, the economy was recovering briskly, growing at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion while prices were rising an average of just 1.4% per year. That changed when Congress and the Biden-Harris administration decided to spend trillions of dollars the nation didn’t have.
The profligate spending in Washington over the last four years has become so extreme that by the end of the Biden-Harris administration, the Treasury will have borrowed about $8.5 trillion, plus run down its cash balance by about $1 trillion, too. That’s net overspending of about $9.5 trillion—a record for any presidential term and one-quarter of the total federal debt.
The government spent and borrowed so much money over the last four years that there wasn’t enough cash in private sector hands to lend to the Treasury. That’s when the Federal Reserve stepped in and created the money out of nothing for the Treasury to spend.
That devalued the dollar and caused prices everywhere to rise, a phenomenon known as inflation. And the Fed kept interest rates artificially low to reduce borrowing costs for the government. That spilled over into other markets, including housing.
People got mortgages at 2% or 3% interest rates, allowing them to borrow more and still have an affordable monthly payment. Homebuyers proceeded to bid up the price of housing, shattering records.
As inflation ran up to 40-year highs, the Fed belatedly raised interest rates, which meant potential homebuyers then faced the deadly one-two punch of high housing prices and high mortgage interest rates. To own a home, people must borrow more money at the same time the cost to borrow has soared.
It now takes over 36% of the median household income to afford a median-price home in the Pittsburgh area. That’s particularly shocking when you consider that the median home price in this area is 34% below the median price nationwide.
Conversely, in January 2021, it took only about 20% of the median household income to afford a median-price home in the Pittsburgh area. Since that time, however, home prices are up 26% and mortgage interest rates have more than doubled.
Even under normal circumstances, devoting more than one-third of your household’s income to monthly mortgage payments would stress the family budget, but these aren’t normal times. The costs of food, insurance, clothing and transportation have exploded over the last 3½ years, putting families into a record $1.1 trillion of credit card debt.
Americans broadly and Pennsylvanians specifically cannot afford today’s cost-of-living crisis with the punishingly high cost of homeownership and record-high rents.
A family of four in Pennsylvania now needs a stratospheric annual income of $230,000 to live comfortably.
The blame for this situation is rightly laid at the feet of the politicians who caused it with their runaway deficit spending. Vice President Kamala Harris deserves particular scorn in this regard because she provided the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on trillions of dollars in added government spending. That directly led to half the excess inflation that has occurred since 2020.
Unfortunately, politicians such as Ms. Harris and Sen. Bob Casey, Pennsylvania Democrat, not only refuse to accept blame for their role in demolishing the American dream of homeownership, but they’re also creating scapegoats.
They blame corporate greed for inflation, ignoring the fact that the Biden-Harris administration’s own figures prove that businesses themselves are paying higher prices and are merely passing those higher costs along to consumers.
It was government, not business, that spent trillions of dollars it didn’t have, created the highest inflation rate in 40 years and caused a homeownership affordability crisis with the lowest pending home sales ever recorded.
Keystone State residents deserve to know who made the American dream prohibitively expensive: Washington.
