During a recent cabinet meeting, President Trump announced that he wants to see housing prices stay high. Charlie, on today’s edition of The Editors, thinks “it was a crazy thing to say.”
“People are very worried about this,” Charlie says. “People are increasingly of the view that our society is set up to protect the Boomer generation, and that public policy favors the Boomer generation at the expense of everyone else. . . . It is of course true that homeowners . . . want their property to increase in value over time. But it shouldn’t be true that the government suppresses new construction or sets the zoning rules in such a way as to achieve that.”
While Republicans have generally been good on this point, Charlie says, and Democrats have not, he believes that for Trump “to rhetorically ally himself with the Democrats is stupid. It is exactly what he should not be saying right now.”
Charlie stresses that “this is not just, I think, culturally about wealth and increasing one’s assets, but it’s also about what sort of country one wants to live in. And I want to live in a country where there are lots of kids and young families nearby, but that becomes quite difficult if you don’t build new homes.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.