11.06.2024

A victory for Massachusetts voters - and transparency | Biggest issue for next president? The insane cost of everything | More bad signs for downtown Boston | When it comes to Mass. ballot questions, progressive activists on track for some big wins | Save the date: Contrarian Boston and panel of local experts to dive into the housing crisis | Quick hits |

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New president, same daunting challenges: The cost of everything has skyrocketed and whoever wins will face an increasingly fed-up electorate

To repurpose that old James Carville gem, it’s the cost of everything, stupid.

The median price of a home in Greater Boston hit $960,000 back in June. That’s a 14-fold increase over 1980, when it was $65,000.

Nationally, it has risen nearly ten-fold, to $420,000 this fall from just over $47,000 in four decades ago.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, with college tuition, health insurance, electric and gas bills, you name it, all having gone through the roof.

When college tuition and fees at Harvard and other top private universities crossed the $10,000 mark in 1981, the Times reacted in shock. Today, the sticker price for leading private institutions has reached heart attack levels, passing the $90,000 mark.

While that’s bad, the increase in health care costs which impacts everyone, is worse, with families across the country spending on average roughly $31,000 in both premiums and out of pocket costs, according to Healthcare Dive.

That’s a year’s worth of mortgage or rent payment right there.

The “Great Affordability Crisis” is what The Atlantic dubbed it back in 2020, noting how families were being “bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers.”

Enter the pandemic and the trillions in federal stimulus money that began under Trump, but which Biden not only embraced, but upped the ante on, ignoring warnings from former Harvard President Larry Summers, among others.

The result? Inflation went haywire, dousing with gasoline an American electorate already rankled and smoldering after years of escalating costs in big ticket items like housing, health care, college, day care, and utilities.

Prices at the grocery story alone jumped nearly 26 percent between the fall of 2020, when Biden was elected, and spring of this year.

The chart below, courtesy of the Government Accountability Office, tracks the jump in food prices in various cities.

The New York Times’ Ezra Klein harkened back to that Atlantic piece in a June podcast on why the inflation crisis, despite having subsided recently, had left such a bitter taste among voters.

“But today, after years of high inflation, prices are the biggest topic in the economy,” Klein wrote. “And I think that explains the anger people feel: They’re noticing the price of things all the time, and getting hammered with the reality of how expensive these things have become.”

Ezra Klein

Still, while the spike in food and energy prices has been a central issue in the presidential campaign, candidates at all levels have traditionally shied away from all but the occasional sporadic foray into the rising cost of bigger ticket items that have been out of control for years, namely housing, health care, and college.

Amazingly, this is the first presidential election where the candidates have offered major proposals aimed at bringing down home prices and rents - this despite the decades of housing costs racing well past inflation.

Dems may argue they have attempted to come to grips with all these issues, but their focus is too often on expanding overall access to college, health care or housing, to those of modest or no means, with a nod, at best, to controlling costs for those in the middle.

For their part, Republicans have a ready solution to every problem - cut taxes. That appeals to already financially stressed middle-class families, but the underlying structural crisis remains.

Now add to this cost crisis rapid social change and a tidal wave of immigration unlike anything we’ve seen since the early 1900s, and you have a recipe for a sullen, angry electorate.

A lurch to the left? Mass voters give a thumbs up to ballot questions pushed by activist groups