The Fight Over Affordability Is Not a Fight About Prices

Our word, not theirs

On December 6, four days after the Cabinet meeting where the president called the word a con job, Melanie Zanona of NBC News quoted Vice President JD Vance on what the con was supposed to be: "The hoax is the idea that it's our fault and not the Democrats' fault."

House Republicans claimed the word outright. In January the Republican Study Committee, the House conservative caucus, released a framework titled "Making the American Dream Affordable Again." According to the committee's release, it would let Americans save for a home down payment tax-free and redirect health-insurance subsidies from insurers to individuals. Its chairman, Rep. August Pfluger of Texas, said: "Everything we're doing is trying to undo what they've done under Obama and then Biden because it was disastrous for 12 years."

Democrats built a campaign on the word. On April 28, Annie Karni of the New York Times reported that the Congressional Progressive Caucus was about to unveil a "New Affordability Agenda." The Boston Globe republished her article. The agenda held 10 pieces of legislation, "paid for by new tax increases on wealthy Americans." The caucus's chairman, Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, said: "We can't just campaign and say 'affordability' over and over again." Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans' campaign arm, answered: "This is the same far-left agenda that raised costs, just wrapped in a new name for an election year."

Trump called the word an invention in an August 26 interview with the radio host Glenn Beck. "I inherited high prices, and then from the first day, they started using the word 'affordability,'" he said, as Garrett Downs of CNBC reported. "It was a new word. Nobody ever heard the word. It was a new word that they devised because they're quite good at that."

Each side has a case. Democratic operatives told Julie Z. Weil of the Washington Post that the word fits how people live with high prices. "For most Americans, the math doesn't math," said Jeffrey Lerner, who was Zohran Mamdani's communications director in the New York mayoral race. Republicans point to their record. According to Weil, Kiersten Pels, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman, cited Trump's "deals with pharmaceutical companies on drug prices and sweeping tax cuts that reduced taxes for most households."

By the end of the summer the president had claimed the word, called it a con, declared it won and called it an invention. The Democratic leader had made it the name of his campaign. Neither party's leaders had said which way their own cure would lean, or who would pay for it. The Progressive Caucus had named a payer, and the Republican Study Committee had named measures, but neither caucus speaks for its party's leadership.

A question about the cure

Before the July 26 rally, Dana Bash of CNN put the question to Jeffries on State of the Union. His party, she said, "is fighting over whether the path back to the majority runs through the center or the activist left, who want to defund the police, abolish ICE, end aid to Israel, open borders." She asked whether he would push any of those positions. His office's transcript records his answer: "Well what unites the party, and certainly what will take place over the next 100 days, beginning today, is a focus on us fighting for an affordable America, based on the reality that life in this country is far too expensive and everybody agrees that that's the dynamic that the country confronts."

Bash pressed him. "So will those policy proposals be in line with what some of the more progressive members who keep getting elected are pushing? Or will you sort of move more towards the moderate area ...?" she asked. Jeffries answered that "what unites Democrats" was opposing "the largest cut to Medicaid in American history," which "needs to be reversed." He added "extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits," stopping "this reckless and costly war of choice" and stopping "the Trump tariffs."

The charitable reading is strong. Bash's first question was about policing, immigration and Israel. A party leader may fairly answer that his campaign is about costs instead, without settling his caucus's disputes on television. In his second answer he named concrete measures.

The reading survives as a statement of priorities. It does not survive as an answer to Bash's question, which way the party's own cure would lean. Jeffries answered with a problem that "everybody agrees" on, and then a list of the other side's actions to undo. Without the word, the answer comes down to this: prices are too high, and Democrats would reverse the Republicans' Medicaid cuts, their war and their tariffs. Whether the party would build in the progressive direction or the moderate one is still unsaid. The word, Julie Z. Weil wrote in the Post, "speaks to people's ongoing complaints about costs without referencing economic benchmarks." That is a strength, since a price index can miss what a family feels. It is also what lets a word answer a question without answering it.

Nobody ever heard the word

The president's remarks have a charitable reading too. At the same December 2 Cabinet meeting, according to PBS NewsHour, he used the word in its ordinary sense to describe the Biden years: "I inherited the worst inflation in history. ... There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything." Vice President Vance said the hoax was the blame, not the hardship. On this reading the con is the Democrats' use of the word to pin high prices on Republicans. That is an ordinary partisan dispute about cause, the mirror image of Jeffries's answer on CNN.

As a dispute about who caused high prices, that reading survives. Two things in the remarks do not.

The first is a checkable claim about language. In her Post article, Julie Z. Weil reports that "affordability" is "a relatively new term, possibly coined in 1910 in an article in the Indianapolis Star." The word "affordable," she wrote, "took on political connotations through its associations with state-subsidized 'affordable housing' and then the 2010 'Affordable Care Act.'" The newsletter count shows only that the slogan is recent. "Nobody ever heard the word" does not survive that history.

The second is that the remarks treat the word as the thing. When the president said "You notice what word have you not heard over the last two weeks ... Because I've won" in Georgia, he offered the word's absence from the conversation as evidence of victory over what it names. Bloomberg Government's report is behind a paywall. Its opening sentence says he also pointed to stock-market gains. In the sentence quoted, the word's absence is offered as the evidence.

Hardly Thinking calls this pattern G9: Language as Territory: a fight about which word applies, fought as though it were a fight about the facts.

The two versions of the charge also work as a pair. The bold one, that the word itself is a con, came from the president on December 2. The modest one, that the blame is misplaced, came from the vice president in an NBC News report four days later. The bold one returned on August 26. A critic of the bold claim can be answered with the modest one, and the bold one stays in use.

This finding is lopsided, and it falls on the Republican side. Trump is the only figure in this fight who has called the word fake, claimed it and declared it won. The charitable reading of Jeffries's answer also survives further than the charitable reading of the president's remarks. Yet the underlying move is the same on both sides. Jeffries said the Medicaid cut "needs to be reversed." Rep. August Pfluger, the Republican Study Committee chairman, said, "Everything we're doing is trying to undo what they've done under Obama and then Biden." Each leadership fills the word with the other side's record.

"Real" affordability and "true" affordability

Melvin Medina is vice president of advocacy and external affairs at the Connecticut Project Action Fund, a progressive group. In an April 9 opinion piece for the CT Mirror, he wrote that the "popular political narrative is 'affordability,'" and set his own measure: "Stability is the true measure of whether people are doing okay. Anything short of that is just branding." Then he defined the word: "Real affordability means being honest about why stability has been out of reach for so many working people: because of unfair policies that put rising costs on the backs of the people least able to afford them ..."

Derrick A. Max is president and chief executive of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, a free-market Virginia think tank. In a January 16 essay for the institute, he made the same diagnosis. Candidates, he wrote, had promised affordable everything, "often without defining what affordability means." He asked the question the word leaves out: "It is a relative condition that always raises a critical question: affordable for whom, at what cost, and paid for by whom?" Then he defined the word: "true affordability comes from abundance, competition, and growth, not price controls or mandates."

Both are open advocates who argue at length, Medina for a refundable tax credit for renters and Max against a higher minimum wage and rent control. As arguments for a program, both survive. The move they share is smaller. Each treats the word as a slogan in other people's mouths and then attaches "real" or "true" to his own program. The philosopher C. L. Stevenson called this a persuasive definition, one that keeps a word's approving force while changing what it refers to. Such definitions, he wrote in 1938, "are often recognizable from the words 'real' or 'true,' employed in a metaphorical sense." Max's case is the sharper of the two, because he supplied the test and did not run it on his own side. He wrote that "every policy that claims to make life more affordable must answer hard questions about ... who ultimately pays," and he put that question to the minimum wage and to rent control, but never to "abundance, competition, and growth."

Old policy in a new name

A second move runs both ways: calling the other side's word a disguise.

Ted Jenkin, a financial adviser and talk-show host, wrote against the Democratic agenda in an October 9 column for Fox News. He asked a practical question: "Did you actually lower the cost, or did you just find somebody else to pay the bill?" He granted that some Democratic ideas, such as "cutting zoning and permitting restrictions to build more housing," "could actually increase supply," and that "some of their proposals deserve a legitimate debate." He stated his own cure, "attacking supply, competition, regulation and productivity." He also held his own party to it: "Yet Democrats, and frankly, Republicans, when it suits them, regularly embrace government benefits without spending nearly enough time discussing the ultimate bill."

The question and the concessions survive. The column's rhetoric does not. Midway through, Jenkin wrote: "We used to call it tax and spend. Now we call it affordability." Near the end, he made the word itself the disguise. A few lines after he granted that some proposals deserve debate, he wrote: "Tax. Spend. Subsidize. Repeat. Just don't call it that anymore. Call it affordability." The National Republican Congressional Committee's line about the Progressive Caucus agenda, "wrapped in a new name," does the same. Annie Karni's New York Times report says who would pay for that agenda: "wealthy Americans," through new taxes. The payer is named. The committee's line answers the word rather than the legislation.

From the left, the charge runs the other way. Mike Lux, a progressive Democratic strategist, wrote in the progressive magazine The Nation on February 19 that "much of the party leadership believes they can glide into a 2026 election victory by simply attacking Trump and repeating the word affordability." That is a complaint about his own side. He then named the president's proposals, among them a 10 percent cap on credit-card interest rates, and warned that "Trump's team is politically flexible enough to craft a populist-sounding affordability package that—rhetorically, if not substantively—borrows key elements of the Elizabeth Warren and Zohran Mamdani agenda." His warning to his own party holds. "If not substantively" calls the proposals hollow without showing that they are.

The Pattern Underneath: language as territory

One pattern connects these passages, the one Hardly Thinking calls G9: Language as Territory. It has two familiar poles, and both turned up here.

The renamers believe that getting the right meaning attached to a word does the moral work. Melvin Medina's "real affordability" in the CT Mirror and Derrick A. Max's "true affordability" for the Thomas Jefferson Institute are renamings, one from the left and one from the right. A January memo from four Democratic senators is another. Alexander Bolton of The Hill quoted its call for "a platform rooted in true economic populism."

The resisters treat a new word as a trick and fight the word instead of the thing it names. The president's "con job" and "a new word that they devised" are resistance. The same goes for Ted Jenkin's "Now we call it affordability," in his Fox News column, and the Republican campaign committee's "wrapped in a new name." The nearest move on the left is a charge of counterfeit, not resistance to a new word: Mike Lux's "populist-sounding" package, and the senators' description of Trump's 2024 "campaign of faux economic populism." On this pole the evidence leans right.

The affordability fight adds something the two poles do not quite describe. Neither side renames or resists for long. Both try to capture the same word, and each fills it with its own cause and its own villain.

Without the word, what is left is an argument about causes that crosses party lines. On tariffs, Jim Kessler of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, faulted the progressive agenda for leaving them out. "The No. 1 thing you would do is end the tariffs," he said in Annie Karni's New York Times report. In November 2025, Veronique de Rugy wrote in the libertarian magazine Reason that "The president's tariffs don't help." On corporate power, Lux's case in The Nation against "corporate concentration" has a counterpart on the right. George P. Brooks, a self-described MAGA conservative, wrote on the conservative site American Thinker in September. He faulted his own side for "tolerating corporate dependency upon subsidies, regulatory favoritism, tax carve-outs, and government contracts." None of those alliances is visible in the fight over the word.

The tools, used and abused

The tools on Hardly Thinking are questions a reader can run on any argument, including their own. Each has a fair use and a weaponized one, in which the same move is used to win rather than to understand. Two were made for this pattern.

E1: The Taboo-the-Word Move sets the contested word aside and makes every side say what it means in plain terms. Run on Hakeem Jeffries's answer on CNN, it leaves a list of reversals and no direction. Its weaponized form is a redefinition with the conclusion built in. That is close to what "real" and "true" affordability do, and to what "tax and spend" does to the other side's word.

E2: The Operationalization Demand asks what, specifically, would count, and how it would be measured. Derrick A. Max's "affordable for whom, at what cost, and paid for by whom?" is E2. Ted Jenkin's "Did you actually lower the cost, or did you just find somebody else to pay the bill?" is another. Its weaponized form, an endless demand for precision used to stall, did not clearly appear in this fight. The common failure was quieter: asking the question of the other side only.

Some people in each party use the tools on their own side. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said, as Melanie Zanona of NBC News reported: "For prices to actually go down — people kind of misinterpret this — we'd have to actually have deflation. ... And what we have is less inflation." That separates lower prices from slower-rising ones, which both parties' slogans blur. Rep. Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat, said on John Heilemann's Impolitic podcast, as Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle reported: "I'm like, 'Guys, don't use that word.' We've got to be specific and local and visceral." They are using the tools as intended, on their own side first.

Analysts fill the word too. In the free opening of a November 30, 2025, post on his newsletter, the economist Paul Krugman argued that "economic inclusion, security, and fairness" "underlie people's perceptions of affordability," and said openly that he was building toward "a general affordability agenda for the Democrats." He filled the word with one side's program, as the campaigns do, and he said so.

A reader who ran E1 and E2 only on the side they oppose has used them as weapons. Take your own answer to why life has gotten so expensive and ban the word "affordability" from it. What is the cause, what is the cure, and who pays? If your answer named the other side, ask what your own side would build, and who would pay for it. If you could not say at once, you were using the word the way the campaigns use it. Running a tool on your own side first is a habit HT calls A4: The Mirror Check.

George P. Brooks, in his American Thinker essay, ran it on his own side. "I am MAGA, but I am not interested in political sycophancy," he wrote, and warned that Republicans, now in power, "should be extraordinarily careful not to develop the same convenient deafness we condemned in Democrats." Most people in this fight save that warning for the other side, as most of the rest of us do.

Reader review

Every HT article ends by asking readers to check it against its own rules. The question is not what you think about prices, but whether the article met the standards it applies to others.

1. Find the passage where the article was hardest on the side you agree with, and the one where it was softest on the side you oppose. Were they judged by the same standard?
2. The article says its most lopsided finding falls on the Republican side. Does its evidence support that, or were its Republican examples chosen more harshly?
3. Choose one quotation and check it against the linked source. Is the surrounding context fair to the speaker?
4. Run E2, the Operationalization Demand, on one position the article describes: "What is the cause, what is the cure, and who pays?" Does the article state all three, or does a label stand in for them?
5. The article runs E1, the Taboo-the-Word Move, on Hakeem Jeffries's answer on CNN. Run it on the article's own key words, "own" and "capture." Does the article say plainly what owning or capturing a word means, and how you would know it had happened, or do the words carry the argument?
6. The "abundance" Democrats, who argue that the cure is building more, do not appear in the article. Does their absence change the picture?
7. The article describes what statements do with the word. Find the sentence where it comes closest to judging why a speaker said something.