Even if your name isn’t Joe Biden, it’s still very easy to forget pretty much everything the Biden administration attempted to do during their four years in office. It’s one of those administrations that everyone, regardless of party affiliation, wants to wipe from memory as soon as possible. Biden was obviously a historic failure, whose only legacy — if you can even call it that — is employing operatives who hunted down and jailed the political opponents of the Democratic Party.
But especially if you’re a young person right now, and you’re trying to buy your first home and take part in a foundational component of the American dream, it’s important to take a step back and consider very carefully what the Biden administration attempted to do. At every turn, the Biden White House took pains to make home ownership more challenging and more expensive for American citizens. In retrospect, you can make the case that this was, in fact, the primary goal of the Biden administration. Every major policy proposal, every executive action — regardless of how it was advertised — was, in reality, geared towards raising the cost of home ownership.
It’s not an academic exercise to make this point now, even though the Biden administration is out of power. It’s actually extremely important because, first of all, we have to reverse what the Biden administration did. And secondly, when conservatives are crafting their own rules to make it easier to own a home, they can’t emulate the Biden administration’s proposals in any way. And at the moment, that appears to be what’s happening. The Trump administration is going down the same road as the Biden administration, whether they realize it or not. And they need to reverse course immediately, unless we want to see everyone under the age of 40 vote for Democrats in next year’s midterms.
We’ll start with this headline from the Biden era, which sounds like it can’t possibly be real. This is a direct quote from ABC News:
Why having good credit could cost you more on a home mortgage: In some cases, people with better credit scores may pay more in fees, while those with lower credit scores will pay less. … The [Biden] administration’s stated purpose behind making these changes is to help make it easier for borrowers who have historically been disadvantaged and have had a hard time accessing credit.
In practical terms, the proposal would penalize anyone with a credit score over 680, with an additional fee of roughly $40 a month. And if you put down a large down payment — between 15% and 20% — then you’d pay an even larger fee. The goal, according to the government, was to “redistribute funds to reduce the interest rate paid by less qualified buyers.”
At the time, the story was covered as an effort by the Biden administration to buy votes, which it clearly was. But the other effect of this proposal, of course, was to make it more difficult for Americans to buy homes. This is a zero-sum proposal we’re talking about. People were being punished for doing the right thing and saving up to buy a home, in the form of additional fees. They deliberately made housing more difficult to obtain. And indeed, this was nothing new for Democrats.
The Obama administration famously filed lawsuits against various suburbs, including Westchester County, New York, for failing to construct low-income, high-density housing complexes inside their suburbs. They wanted to tear down suburban homes and replace them with apartments, essentially. And they went to court to do it.
Coincidentally enough, all of these policies — and many more like them — were extraordinarily beneficial for America’s rapidly growing population of illegal aliens. If you live in a suburb that’s suddenly been overtaken by rapid demographic change, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. At precisely the same time that Americans are struggling more than ever to own their own homes, it’s never been easier for illegal aliens to buy property without putting anything down.
The solution is not to double down on these Biden-era proposals and make it even easier to put people inside houses that they can’t actually afford. Democrats pushed those policies because they needed a place to put all of their new voters, and in doing so, they raised prices for everyone else.
Republicans, however, have no reason to emulate this strategy. We elected them to make housing more affordable for Americans.
As we briefly discussed the other day, the Trump administration’s current policy proposals will not succeed in accomplishing that objective. Instead, in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, the president seemed extremely cavalier about the introduction of new 50-year mortgages, which would be a catastrophically bad idea in about a million different ways.
According to Politico, what happened is that the federal housing director, Bill Pulte (who also serves as the chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), showed up at Palm Beach Golf Club with a 3-by-5 poster board in his hands.
Credit: @realdonaldtrump/TruthSocial
Credit: @realDonaldTrump/TruthSocial.com
And the poster board, as you can see here, showed “a graphic of former president Franklin Roosevelt” below the words “30-year-mortgage,” along with a picture of Trump below the words “50-year-mortgage.” And the headline on the poster board was “Great American presidents.” And then 10 minutes later, Trump posted the image on Truth Social.
So that’s how you lobby the president, apparently. But in speaking to Laura Ingraham, it didn’t appear that the president fully understood the implications of this proposal. He also seemed to be under the impression that people are currently getting 40-year mortgages, which obviously isn’t true. Watch:
Ingraham: Is a 50 year mortgage really a good idea?
Trump: It’s not even a big deal. You go from 40 years to 50
Ingraham: 30 pic.twitter.com/W07mMUjz97
— Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025
Credit: @Acyn/X.com
This is one of those clips that, even if you’re mostly a very strong supporter of what this administration is doing — and I am — you simply cannot allow it to stand. And as we’ll see in a second, there was at least one more clip from this interview, along these lines. This was a very strange interview, and no one on the Right voted for any of it. But before we address that, let’s talk about the reality of a 50-year mortgage, because contrary to what you just heard, it is indeed a very big deal. And it’s also a very, very bad deal.
If you take out a $400,000 mortgage, and you choose a 50-year mortgage, the difference in your monthly payment is probably going to be around $150 a month. That’s it. Meanwhile, over the extra 20 years, you’re going to spend roughly $500,000 — yes, half a million dollars — in extra interest payments. You’re going to spend two decades doing nothing but paying off the bank. And if you don’t make it that far — which you probably won’t — then the bank gets your house back. Miss a couple of payments, and everything is gone. All to save $150 a month. And if you want to sell your home at any point, the 50-year-mortgage is going to cause problems there, as well. After 10 years of making payments, you’ll have less than $20,000 in equity in the home. Just to say that again, in case you missed it: after 10 years of making every payment, you will only have 20 thousand dollars in equity. You might even be underwater on the loan. Meanwhile, with a normal 30-year mortgage, you’d have nearly $60,000 in equity. These are massive, massive differences, for very small monthly savings. You’re basically renting the property, instead of owning it.
So why are we hearing something like this from the Trump administration? It’s indistinguishable from a proposal the Biden administration might suggest, as a way of getting more illegal aliens in more homes. What we should be hearing from the president is very different. He should acknowledge that any American adult who works a full-time job and fulfills their basic adult responsibilities should be able to own a home. It’s not that anyone has a “right” to home ownership per se. Home ownership — unlike, say, free speech rights — is a thing you have to work to achieve. But you should be able to achieve it. Home ownership should be achievable for most competent, working adults in a healthy and thriving country. And if our country is failing to provide that opportunity, then the solution is not to turn more Americans into de facto renters.
A much better idea — one that will actually lower the price of homes — is to deport all of the tens of millions of foreigners who are here illegally and taking up housing that should go to Americans. Give America back to Americans. How about 50 million deportations instead of 50-year mortgages?
Better yet, how about a 50-year immigration moratorium? How about we hear a single sentence — just one single sentence — from this administration about the fact that Somalis are now so entrenched in this country that they’re playing out tribal feuds in municipal elections? What do you think 100,000 Somalis have done for housing prices in Minneapolis?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Someone needs to answer it. But as far as I know, no one in the White House has done it.
So here’s my best guess. Minneapolis has 430,000 people. Let’s say 5% are Somali, which is a lowball estimate. And let’s assume that these 20,000 Somalis occupy around 5,000 rental units and 700 homes, and the rest are homeless — which, again, is a very lowball estimate. I’m just using these numbers for the sake of argument here. Getting rid of all the Somalis, even given these very generous assumptions, would double the rental vacancy rate in Minneapolis, from 7% to 15% city-wide. Lease prices would plummet, allowing young adults to save a lot more money, much faster, to buy a home of their own. Median rents would drop like a rock. Meanwhile, for homeowners, the median price of a home would drop by around $30,000. And this is just from deporting one group of third-worlders in one city.
This is an actual, tangible result that the administration could get to work on right away. They could end Somalia’s temporary protected status and denaturalize and deport as many Somalis as possible. And then they could get to work on every other large population of foreign nationals in this country. It’s obviously worth a try, at a minimum. But as far as I can tell, this administration hasn’t done anything on this front. The president has joked about deporting Ilhan Omar. The administration has gone out of its way to limit its immigration enforcement to illegal aliens who also have extensive criminal records. And that’s about all we get.
In the meantime, the housing market isn’t just dire. It’s historically bad.
Source: NAR SMBC Nikko
In 2000, the median homebuyer was around 40 years old. Now he’s 61 years old. And the number of first-time homebuyers is now down to 21% of all home sales, when it was double that number back in 2005. Private equity firms and institutional real estate investors are buying something like 33% of all single-family homes, as of the second quarter of this year. That’s the highest percentage in the last five years.
If you look at this data, from the National Association of Realtors, you’ll see where the problem for first-time home buyers began in earnest.
Source: National Association of Realtors
As you can see, the median age of first-time home buyers, which is indicated by the yellow line, began spiking very sharply in 2020. And you probably remember what was going on at that time. We had the COVID lockdowns and massive government stimulus spending to keep the economy afloat. The money was flowing like a firehose — there wasn’t any sober, rational analysis going on. People were getting thousands of dollars in the mail. Tens of thousands of fraudulent businesses were established to collect on emergency loans. And at the same time, the Fed also cut interest rates to near-zero.
So the government directly contributed to the high price of homes that we’re seeing right now. It stands to reason that the government can take action to reduce the price of homes. Lower interest rates are part of the solution. Cutting any kind of discretionary spending is another. But Republicans aren’t doing that. They’ve just voted to fully fund the SNAP program, which, as we’ve discussed previously, is an even bigger fraud than the COVID “paycheck protection program.” Whenever they have an opportunity to actually lower prices on housing, Republicans aren’t doing it.
And the president, in this interview, didn’t seem interested in helping to address the problem either. At one point, he stated that we need foreign migration because Americans don’t have the skills to perform jobs that are necessary. Watch:
INGRAHAM: “If you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with foreign workers.”
POTUS: “I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.”
INGRAHAM: “We have plenty of talented people here.”
POTUS: “No, you don’t.” pic.twitter.com/PNT7w069o9
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 12, 2025
Credit: @Breaking911/FoxNews/X.com
Now, I think we have plenty of highly skilled and talented people in this country. I also think that it’s undeniable that we don’t have as many as we should, given that the public school system has been an abject, disastrous failure for decades now. But the solution is not to flood the market with foreigners. If Trump is right about American workers not having the skills, that would be all the more reason to cut off the H1-B program and train up actual Americans. Because America is for Americans, as provocative as that idea may be.
At the very least — the absolute minimum — the president should be explaining, in detail, what he’s doing to stop the abuse of the H1-B system and the rampant fraud that’s involved, which is so flagrant that everyone in the technology industry talks about it all the time. He should tell us how he’s drastically scaling back the number of H1-Bs, the vast majority of whom are not, in fact, working in highly technical or specialized fields. Again, this is the bare minimum. Personally, I’d like to see the program abolished entirely.
Right now, there are accounts on X that are exclusively devoted to exposing how various large companies, including Nextdoor, are defrauding the H-1B system by posting job advertisements on random, no-name online job boards. Here’s just one example of what these ads look like:
Source: JobsNowPR/X.com
Basically, to hire H1-Bs, a company needs to show that they made a “good faith” effort to hire Americans first. So they post an ad on one of these job boards, get no responses, and then claim that Americans weren’t interested. Keep in mind, Nextdoor could’ve listed this job on their official job openings website, but they didn’t.
This is a practice that’s obviously worth a few criminal investigations. But as of now, only a few X accounts seem interested in stopping it. That needs to change.
All of those steps, in the end, would reduce the competition for housing in this country, especially in high-demand areas like Northern California and parts of Texas. And they’re actual, useful steps — not band-aids that will actually make the problem worse, like a 50-year mortgage. It’s basic supply and demand.
Also, not to jump on my anti-AI soapbox again, but we should probably put some regulations in place before AI wipes out millions of jobs and makes home ownership (or owning anything else) impossible for millions more Americans. Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT how many jobs will be eliminated by AI in the next ten years, and it estimated up to 15%, which is about 25 million jobs lost. That strikes me as quite conservative, but even “just” 15% would be catastrophic. I’m not sure how our society can absorb those losses without causing a full-scale collapse.
Entire industries — from transportation to consulting — are going to be decimated. What are the millions of truckers and secretaries and customer support representatives and accountants and lawyers, and consultants going to do when AI can easily replace them? Two decades ago, a book was published entitled “Who Owns the Future?” And it’s one of the few serious explorations of this question that I’ve seen, even though it didn’t deal with AI explicitly. And it’s worth a read for that reason alone. The author, Jaron Lanier, proposes that people should be compensated for contributing to various online economies and “free” services, like Facebook and Google, and helping to train their various algorithms. So if an AI uses your posts on Reddit for training data, or your Facebook arguments, or whatever, then you get royalties. If AI is truly going to generate trillions in revenues, then these payouts would be trivial for the companies, and potentially lifesaving for everyone else.
There are other solutions, too. Elon Musk has proposed that, when his robotaxis go live — with no one in the driver’s seat — Uber drivers will be able to manage entire fleets of taxis, and make money that way. Although again, that is a bare minimum kind of solution, as far as I’m concerned. Personally, I think we should pass laws banning companies from wiping out entire categories of jobs in favor of AI. That’s the sort of thing that makes free market conservatives — like me — very uncomfortable. But we are at a moment in history when we have to choose between doing things that make us uncomfortable, or allowing millions of people — millions at a time — to lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and any chance of owning a home or experiencing anything like the American dream. We have to do something. We cannot just sit back and let this happen. The bottom line is that the Trump administration needs to be talking about solutions like this. It’s not enough to minimize the problem or make it worse.
Politically, there’s simply no other option. The conservative movement must seriously address these kinds of problems. The entire movement will be left in the dust if we don’t work on ways to actually improve Americans’ lives and address the real challenges they face daily. The only point of any of this — the only point of politics or economics or anything else — is or should be to see to the well-being of American citizens. All of our systems should serve exactly one purpose and one purpose only, which is to help our citizens live good lives. Anything that does not serve that purpose is bad or useless. Anything that does serve that purpose is good. It’s pretty simple. This is not socialism. Socialism, in fact, is bad precisely because it does not enhance the well-being of the citizenry, but instead makes their lives worse by every metric. And this is the metric. This is the thing we should be focused on. It’s why the home ownership issue is crucially important. So much of the conversation on the right is about foreign policy and global affairs. Meanwhile, the average American is wondering if he’ll ever be able to buy a house, and if the industry he works in will still exist five years from now. Those are very real concerns. They’re some of the most important concerns that a country can face. And if Republicans don’t want to address them, then another party — the party that openly seeks to destroy civilization itself — will do it for them, and do it in the worst ways, with the worst answers. But one thing we’ve learned is this: people with bad answers always beat the people with no answers.