Democrats won recent elections in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia by calling attention to the “affordability crisis”—the claim that prices are too high and stretching the budgets of most households. They blame President Trump for the problem while ignoring their own responsibility for causing it in the first place. The Biden administration, enabled by Democratic majorities in Congress, created the crisis through reckless spending, costly regulations, and an open southern border. The facts speak for themselves with respect to prices and inflation, interest rates, mortgage rates, and the costs of housing, food, and electricity.  

When President Trump left office at the beginning of 2021, the annual inflation rate was 1.2 percent. Over the course of his first term in office, inflation increased by a total of about 7 percent, or at a rate of 1.75 percent per year, well below the Federal Reserve’s inflation targets.

President Biden, with the support of his party in Congress, went on a spending spree when he took office, adding nearly four trillion in new spending in 2021 and 2022 through the American Rescue Plan ($1.9 trillion), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($1.2 trillion), and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act ($891 billion). These were mostly payoffs to unions, green-energy schemes, and identity groups that supported the Democrats in the 2020 elections. The three measures increased the federal debt to well over $33 trillion and caused prices to rise almost immediately.

A graph by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis showing changes in the Consumer Price Index illustrates how inflation grew rapidly in Biden’s early years in office, increasing from an annual rate of just over 1 percent when President Trump left office to more than 9 percent in mid-2022. All told, inflation increased by about 20 percent over his four years in office, leading to higher prices for all consumer items and escalating interest rates. Prices have stabilized in the past year during President Trump’s second term. 

Interest, as measured by rates on the ten-year Treasury Bond, declined during Trump’s last two years in office, from around 3 percent in 2018 to less than 1 percent at the end of his term. The average interest rate during his four years in office was around 2 percent per year. Those low rates encouraged spending and allowed consumers to borrow to purchase new homes, automobiles, and other goods. There was no talk of an “affordability crisis” during his first term. 

President Biden soon changed all that through his spending programs. Another chart from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis illustrates the increase in interest rates during his term in office, from between 1 and 2 percent on the ten-year bond in 2021 and 2022, to 5 percent in 2023 and 2024, effectively a doubling or tripling of interest rates in just a few years. The interest rate on the ten-year bond is used by banks and other lenders to set rates for loans for most consumer items.

During Trump’s first term in office, interest rates on thirty-year home mortgages hovered at around 4 percent from 2017 to 2019 before falling to less than 3 percent as the Federal Reserve reduced rates to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Due to low mortgage rates, home sales increased to a record of more than one million units per month in late 2020. Strong consumer demand for housing continued into the early years of the Biden administration, before spending policies and rising mortgage rates killed the boom. 

A graph by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank depicts the rise in mortgage interest rates during Biden’s term in office. Mortgage rates were stable at around 3 percent in 2021 and 2022 before they increased sharply to 7 percent in 2023 and 9 percent in 2024, before leveling off and declining in 2025.  Mortgage rates today are around 6 percent.

Those rates put a damper on the sale of homes across the United States. Due to those rising rates, home sales declined from one million per month in 2020 to less than five hundred thousand per month in 2023, much to the frustration of would-be home buyers who could not afford the much higher rates. Sales have rebounded somewhat in 2025, to roughly eight hundred thousand units in the last month, owing to lower mortgage rates.                                 

We now come to the issue of rent. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani made high rental costs a central issue in his recent campaign in New York City. He, like other Democrats, seems to think President Trump is responsible for the problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to another graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, rents increased by around 3 percent annually during Trump’s first term in office, more or less in line with increases in inflation and interest rates.

Yet during Biden’s term in office rents increased sharply, from 3 percent per year in 2021 to 8 percent in 2023, after which point rental costs continued to increase, albeit at a lesser rate; in 2024 they increased by 5.2 percent. In New York City, rents appear to have risen by as much as 20 percent from 2021 to 2023. Biden’s open-border policies have not helped matters with regards to rents and housing costs. Some 10–15 million illegal aliens entered the United States between 2021 and 2025, increasing demand for rentals, particularly in cities.

Rental costs in 2025 have continued to moderate, increasing at around 3.4 percent, according to September’s figures—a rate slightly greater than the overall inflation rate. 

The same pattern holds with food prices as with interest rates, mortgages, and rents. During Trump’s first term, food prices were generally stable, increasing at between 1 and 2 percent annually over his first three years in office. Due to the pandemic, food prices increased somewhat in early 2020, before leveling off again at the end of his term. By the time Biden came into office, food prices had increased by 3.6 percent over the previous year, from 2020 into 2021. 

Once again, according to the data of the St. Louis Fed, Biden’s spending policies caused food prices to surge, increasing by 11 percent per year by late 2022, putting obvious pressures on household budgets, as salaries and wages were not increasing at a corresponding rate in those years. During that period, wheat and corn prices doubled, while prices for milk and rice increased by two-thirds. Since that time, owing to the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policies, increases in food prices have returned to the more moderate levels of the first Trump administration.

During Trump’s first term, gasoline prices (regular, U.S. average) ranged between two and three dollars per gallon, before falling to $1.50 per gallon during the pandemic. The average price was around $2.30 per gallon when Trump entered office in 2016, according to a graph of the St. Louis Fed. Yet prices surged as soon as Biden took office, increasing to $3.18 per gallon early in 2022 and to $4.84 per gallon in mid-2022—a doubling of the price in a little over one year.  

Gasoline prices can rise or fall due to many factors that influence supply and demand in an international market. Considering these factors, there can be little doubt that gasoline prices increased due to overall inflation in the economy, and in part due to the Biden administration’s energy policies, which sought to curtail oil and gas supply in the interest of combating climate change. Biden began to relax some of those polices in the last year of his administration, no doubt seeing the damage they were doing to his popularity and reelection prospects. Gasoline prices fell to around three dollars per gallon at the end of his term and have continued to fall slightly during the early months of Trump’s current administration.

As far as electricity is concerned, high prices were an issue in some recent elections, especially in New Jersey where they have surged in recent years due to Biden-era inflation, green-energy policies adopted by the current governor, and rising demand due to construction of new data centers.  

Electricity prices across the nation were stable at between 13¢ and 14¢ per kilowatt-hour from 2017 until 2021, when Trump left office, according to the data of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. That is consistent with the pattern of other prices during his first term. Those prices surged during Biden’s term, from 13.6¢ per kilowatt-hour when he took office, to 17.9¢ when he departed in 2025—an increase of more than 30 percent over his term in office, due mostly to the overall inflation occurring in those years.

In contrast to the price patterns of other items, prices for electricity have continued to increase over the past year, due mostly (as experts say) to rising demand due to the build-out of new data centers. Green-energy policies inherited from the Biden years have impeded efforts by suppliers to upgrade the electric grid. Trump is attempting to unwind those policies; if he succeeds, then those prices are likely to level off.  

There can be no doubt that rising prices, and the so-called “affordability crisis,” were caused by the blockheaded and incompetent policies of the Biden administration, which included reckless spending, counterproductive green-energy policies, and an open southern border. There may, however, be a silver lining to this sorry episode: those same policies probably led to the Democrats’ losing the 2024 election. Voters were not fooled as to which party was to blame for their economic troubles.

Democratic leaders are now running away from the problems they created, hoping to deflect blame toward President Trump. Given the facts, one hopes that voters will see through their efforts.