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‘Affordability’ Will Be Trump’s Waterloo

By Rick Ackerman Posted on November 16, 2025, 5:00 pm EST Last Updated November 19, 2025, 2:21 pm EST

The ‘affordability’ issue percolated to the top of the news last week, but in a peculiar way. On the right, the debate was not about whether things in general are becoming less affordable for most Americans, as they unmistakably are, but whether the left has blown the issue far out of proportion to create a wave of discontent ahead of next November’s general election.  The discussion was catalyzed by abysmal consumer sentiment numbers that registered lows not seen since the Great Depression. Trump courted controversy over this in an interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham. The economy is going great guns, he declaimed, and what’s the problem? He then stepped into quicksand by owning an issue far more real than political. Although he didn’t say these words exactly, what America heard was:  “I’m going to give you affordability like you won’t believe.” This is a promise he cannot possibly keep, and his stumble on this key issue eventually will be seen as the beginning of the end for boom times on Wall Street and the Everything Bubble.

In stark actuality, the Second Great Depression has already begun for half of America. As my colleague Charles Hugh-Smith notes, the rich have grown increasingly wealthy from a price bubble in real estate and financial assets while barely noticing the descent of the bottom 50% into penury. “While the top 10% busy themselves with using AI to improve work flow, obsessing over geopolitics and the decay of their perks of their Titanium credit card, other Americans are concerned with finding a second or third side-hustle as the soaring costs of utilities, rent, auto insurance and repairs, childcare and healthcare are forcing choices nobody wants to make: What [necessities to forgo.]”

The Best of Times? 

Trump risks failure by amping up his spiel about how we are all living in the best of times. Although some of his MAGA ambitions are well-conceived and achievable, his agenda cannot succeed until America has paid down debts that will continue to suck the oxygen from any real or lasting recovery. The President seems to think stoking credit will enable us to grow our way out of these obligations. This is an absurdity, and the stock market appears to have caught the pungent scent of snake oil in Trump’s nostrums. Even as legacy-media hacks were loudly proclaiming the Dow Average’s climb to new record highs last week, the Nasdaq and S&P 500 were conspicuous laggards. The divergence suggests the stock market has either topped or is very close to doing so, a possibility that I headlined here a few weeks ago. Most investors will not believe it until the Dow plunges 2,000 or more points in a single day. That day is coming, probably no later than January and possibly much sooner, and it will mark only the beginning of a downturn that will be one for the ages.

  • Pan November 18, 2025, 10:34 am

    Hi Rick,

    After so many years, your commentaries still remain essential Monday morning reading. I wonder, if perhaps, one day you’ll wish you had written that book after all. Maybe, your internal challenge is, how to write it all in a single book? Well, that’s not an issue, just write several : )

    With all due respect,

    Pan.

    • Rick Ackerman November 18, 2025, 4:55 pm

      Thanks for the kind words, Pan. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed my commentaries over the years. However, I honestly don’t think they deserve a book, and I doubt many would buy it. RA

  • Ben November 17, 2025, 12:30 am

    By the way, love the essay (?) written by Charles Hugh Smith. Some serious good reading! I’m at the “This not-left-or-right” part, where I’ve had to stop (time to hit the sack). Seems he has a lot to say, and I’m going to read it all. Thanks for sharing!

    &&&&&&

    Search a million blog sites and you will not find a deeper thinker than Charles. He is not afraid to confront the truth, nor to describe the economically ruinous path we are on. RA

  • Ben November 16, 2025, 10:27 pm

    I don’t think Democrats are over blowing it (unfortunately). But there is something Trump can do to offer some relief…

    https://youtu.be/nqlHFaEejn4

    Much is not all of that manipulative crap needs to be made illegal, but the point I think contributes most to high grocery prices is the first point: the “real estate” war — and perhaps even more than inflation itself does — for who spends the most to out-compete in the shelf war rakes in the most money, which allows them to keep paying for the prime space, so that they make the most money…

    It’s a perma-monopoly. Not only is it making groceries WAY more expensive than they need to be in order to get food from farm to shelf, but it’s driving more and more people to reliance upon credit and SNAP… which the mega-wealthy actually PROFIT from (and all other Big Government spending), which is why so many mega-wealthy are Democrats: the more government spending increases, the more money they make from it.

    If Trump really wants to make our heads spin from giving us affordability like never before… Busting this monopolistic system would go a long way towards achieving that goal!

    • Rick Ackerman November 17, 2025, 9:14 am

      It’s much, much more than groceries that are inflating. The price of nearly EVERYTHING is going up. Even if you could push the price of a cart full of groceries to zero, it wouldn’t begin to compensate for the price increases that have already occurred in healthcare, housing and automobiles. One of the biggest, always-increasing costs of all is debt service, for which we get nothing in return. Whatever happens, Trump cannot affect the immutable law of debt, as stated by the late C.V. Myers: Ultimately, every penny of every debt must be paid — if not by the borrower, then by the lender.

      Sometimes the cost of debt cannot be easily measured in dollars. For instance, we started payiing heavily decades ago when erstwhile homemakers had to join the workforce to help keep their households solvent. The move toward telemedicine, a big step down in the quality of medical care, is another way in which we are paying to keep up certain services, goods and amenities, some of which are essential, that we can no longer afford. Everything we buy is getting hollowed out, and that is how we are “paying” down debt. We are not gaining on this task, either; we continue to lose ground each and every day. RA }}}

      • Ben November 17, 2025, 2:57 pm

        I realize that, Rick, but I picked grocery prices because it is something most everyone has high on their list of concerns, which has a very simple cause and, therefore, a very simple solution, which would drop prices almost literally over night (and just in time for Thanksgiving!). If people don’t get some kind of relief, and very soon, they WILL run to the Marxists that Democrats now openly flaunt, knowing that people are desperate enough to try it, since there is nothing else. As for the other problems…

        I can go to lengths about healthcare costs, as I’ve long said the problem has been the commodification of it, what started with the arrival of health insurance and, soon after, government programs. The increasing costs over the decades is “just” Greed for a bigger slice of those Big OPM pies, private and public. Get rid of both insurance and government programs, and they’ll have to return to being humble services.

        But driving all of this Greed is _the_ Greed of Greed: those of the missing pennies you’ve described. But it also has a simple, Gordian Knot solution. The Problem…

        In a village with a $10,000 economy, a farmer borrows $10 @ 0.1% interest, owing $10.01. Easy to come up with that interest, since there’s one million pennies in the economy. Right? No. Trouble is, the village needs one-million and one, but has only one-million. And so the game of the missing penny begins, with each having it passed to them, each doing everything in their power to pass it on to someone else, ending with exactly what we have today.

        The Solution: What’s the problem? Someone SAID there was a penny in debt and everyone BELIEVED it to be so. All an illusion! Those missing pennies can NEVER be paid back because they never existed to being with. But so long as we believe the illusions and deceits, The Monster will only continue to grow and eat and eat and eat…

        These problems are all simple and quite fixable. Easy. But fixing _people_ is another matter.

        &&&&&

        I don’t believe these problems are fixable at all, let alone easily, or that they are based on a ‘misunderstanding’ of borrowing. We got in so deep because it is human nature to want free lunch. And medical costs are so high because we made healthcare a tex-free benefit for corporate and government workers.

        What we borrowed is quite real, since it represents a direct claim on future earnings. Every penny of it will ultimately have to be repaid, as I keep shouting from the rooftop. But because the sum is too large to repay out of earnings and savings, it will have to come out of asset values. That is the mechanism of the debt deflation that is coming — waves and waves of bankruptcies that will wipe eight or nine zeros from the global ledger. Some say it will be a hyperinflation that does this, but I believe that is nearly impossible, since it would destroy lenders (i.e., the Powers That Be) as a class while letting exuberant borrowers skip naked in the streets. RA }}}


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