The 2024 season of The Blame Game is turning out to be something of a bust. It feels as if every week is a rerun at this point. For example, you may have heard that Joe Biden's handlers shipped him off to Nevada today to see if they might be able to pump a little life back into his poll numbers in the battleground state. Biden was scheduled to single out a new target to blame for the conditions driving so much unrest around the country. But really it was just a different chorus of the same tune he's been singing all through the election season. This week's culprit is "rent-gouging landlords." CNBC has the details.
President Joe Biden will visit the battleground state of Nevada on Tuesday to take aim at corporate landlords, who the White House claims are keeping rents artificially high even as overall inflation has eased.
Biden’s attack on what he calls “rent gouging” is part of his broader election-year effort to shift the blame for stubbornly high costs of living away from the president and his economic policies, and onto corporations with outsize pricing powers.
As public sentiment about the economy turns more upbeat, housing remains a major pain point. The most recent consumer price index, a key measure of inflation, found that energy and shelter costs were the primary drivers of February’s 0.4% climb in consumer prices.
Do you recall when Joe Biden was trying to blame "shrinkflation" for rising costs? That was the fault of the greedy retail outlets and producers. And high energy costs were the fault of greedy Mega-MAGA Republicans who didn't want to build more windmills or something. It's always somebody else's fault, just so long as you don't try to blame Biden's own policies. And much of the legacy media will likely be talking about greedy landlords by tomorrow morning.
This entire line of attack sounds like it was cooked up by someone who doesn't really understand the real estate game. Property owners, be they corporate or private, are in competition with others for their share of the market. It's the same all across a capitalist system like ours. People and companies charge what the market will bear. If you charge too much, renters will go to your competitors and you go under. If you undercut your competitors to the point where you can't meet your own costs and expenses, you go under. The prices vary from region to region, of course - sometimes wildly - but the basic governing rules apply.
If you believe that the cost of something, including housing, is too high, you have two options. One way to lower costs is to reduce demand. However, reducing the demand for a fundamental need such as shelter is generally impossible. That's particularly true when you are importing millions of new people into the country who are demanding a roof over their heads. So that's probably a bust.
The other way to reduce costs is to increase the supply. If supply increases and demand remains the same, prices come down. So how do you increase the amount of available housing? It would either have to take place in the private sector or via the development of government housing. The private sector regulates itself. If there is sufficient demand and opportunity to be profitable, the construction will start on its own. If not, it won't.
That leaves public housing. The government does at least have some ability to control that. But those are expensive projects that bust budgets and take a long time to come to fruition. As soon as you manage to complete more construction, it fills up almost immediately. That's particularly true in the middle of the Biden border crisis.
So Joe Biden can give all the speeches he likes and blame the "greedy landlords" for the cost of rent and high mortgage rates. (Housing costs were recently cited as the second most important economic issue for voters.) But people are expecting someone to actually do something about it, not just talk about it. And Joe Biden is the guy who asked for this job. Good luck with that.
