Tag: cost of living
Democrats Smack President For Dropping Promise To Reduce Food Prices

Democrats Smack President For Dropping Promise To Reduce Food Prices

Recent Department of Agriculture data shows that egg prices increased 14.5 percent since President Donald Trump took office, increasing from $6.57 to $7.52 per dozen. And for the week of February 2 through February 7, egg prices have gone up even more, with large eggs costing $7.72 per dozen.

Bird flu has caused egg prices to rise to all-time highs in grocery stores, fast-food chains, and diners, but Trump has yet to address the issue.

In fact, since his second term began, Trump has only uttered the word “food” six times when speaking at a political rally or to reporters. He hasn't said the word “eggs” since he was sworn in.

Instead, Trump has been focused on signing a staggering 84 executive actions—including orders, proclamations, and memos—with not a single one focused explicitly on lowering food costs. After combing through the text of each executive action, Daily Kos found that the words “food” and “eggs” were usedone single time.

A February 1 executive order on tariffs against Mexico, Canada, and China doesn’t only omit food costs, but it would actually raise food prices for Americans.

All of Trump’s sweeping executive orders show his priorities clearly lie elsewhere, like falsely blaming DEI for a tragic plane crash, appointing televangelists to an “anti-Christian bias” taskforce, discriminating against trans people, and unconstitutionally banning birthright citizenship.

Trump is likely banking on Americans having short memories, since it was only a few months ago that he couldn’t stop talking about how he’d fix food prices before being elected.

During the last days of his campaign, from October 12 to November 4, he mentioned “eggs” four times and “food” 23 times. But during his first week in office, he changed his tune, telling reporters that inflation is no longer his No. 1 issue.

“They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue. I said, ‘I disagree,’” Trump said on January 26. “I talked about inflation too, but how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

Democrats take to the floor to call out Trump’s ‘eggflation’

“Why did the Senator cross the road?” Sen. Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island asked on Thursday. “To help drive down ‘eggflation.’"

“The Trump Administration has taken zero substantive steps to address the situation,” he said in a letter to USDA pick Brooke Rollins on Thursday, urging her to act on lowering egg prices.

On Tuesday, Sen. Jacky Rosen, Democrat of Nevada, addressed Trump’s inaction on lowering food costs on the Senate floor. She showed photos of her state’s “empty shelves where the eggs are supposed to be” and said that, if people can find them, “they cost an arm and a leg.”

While Democrats are fighting to lower costs and calling out Trump’s tariffs as “taxes on working families,” the GOP is set on supporting Trump’s chaotic and expensive trade war, no matter how much it hurts Americans’ wallets.

“These tariff taxes will affect groceries because the U.S. imports 38 percent of our fresh vegetables, 60 percent of our fresh fruit, and more than 99 percent of the coffee we drink. If we take all these together, Americans could be seeing an extra $200 a year on their grocery bills because of the Trump tariff tax,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire said on Wednesday.

Trump is making it apparent that he has no plans to work on lowering food prices, and he probably never did—he just knew what to say to swindle voters.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

New York City

What Do We Really Mean By 'Affordable Housing'?

It's being said by conservatives and liberals: America faces a crisis of affordable housing. And the way out of it is to build more houses.

Wouldn't it make more sense to first understand the extent of the problem? Real estate interests have sucked in advocates for the poor in their YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) campaigns. Their mission is often to bulldoze through the zoning laws that ensure a neighborhood's quality of life.

Many residents in America's homeless encampments can't afford anything. New units might provide rent relief for some working-class tenants, down on their luck. Others have problems that go beyond matters of supply and demand.

YIMBY schemes can get pretty outrageous. A developer in New York City recently punched through local zoning laws to build an 80-story billionaire's skyscraper near Manhattan's staid Sutton Place. The area was already full of 20-story apartment buildings, but this guy got permission to break through the height limits in part by offering to create some "affordable" apartments — which happened to be miles away in Queens.

In the meantime, he displaced about 80 families, most of whom lived in the old walkups that actually did provide housing at working-class rents. Often gone too on such projects are the little street-level shops, the florists and the shoe repairs, which preserve a sense of place.

Conservatives frequently tout Houston as a model for affordable housing, crediting its lax zoning laws. The larger reason is that Houston is surrounded by Texas. It can spread into the prairies and gently rolling hills. San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water.

What happens in this country when people feel priced out of neighborhoods is they create new neighborhoods. High rents in Manhattan sent younger workers into neglected parts of Brooklyn that have since been revived.

Gen Z, meanwhile, is reportedly looking at smaller cities, where they can find more space at less cost. The destinations include Oklahoma City; Birmingham, Alabama; Indianapolis; Cincinnati; and Louisville, Kentucky. That trend should take pressure off the very expensive big cities while breathing new life into some very pleasant metros with fine housing stock, places that earlier generations had bypassed.

In the suburbs, there has been such a thing as exclusionary zoning — single-family homes only on large lots — originally intended to keep out poorer people. And some zoning rules that forbid duplexes (two-family homes) make little sense. Converting a garage into a granny apartment shouldn't be a problem. There are also good arguments for filling in some low-density areas, especially near public transportation.

It does not follow, however, that suburbs must submit to any new tower that destroys the small-town feel of their downtowns. Building booms can destroy the historic structures that make a place special.

This is happening all over the world. In Cairo, for example, working-class neighborhoods are being bulldozed and replaced by concrete high-rises.

"If you were being invaded, all what you'd care about is your monuments, your trees, your history, your culture," Mamdouh Sakr, an Egyptian architect and urbanist, said. "And now, it's all being destroyed, without any reason, without any explanation."

Back in the U.S. housing market, rent increases have moderated of late — to the point where economists predict housing should soon bring the inflation numbers down. Falling interest rates are lowering the cost of buying a house. New construction and incentives for some owners to fix up old spaces are indeed adding to supply.

So let's not level neighborhoods in the interests of massive projects. Some ways to address the cost of housing will involve private decisions. Some may involve public subsidies. They certainly shouldn't require handing our Main Streets to the real estate barons.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

The Cure For Expensive Cities Is Moving Vans

The Cure For Expensive Cities Is Moving Vans

A funny thing didn’t happen on the way to the digital revolution. It failed to empty out the cities. If knowledge workers could communicate from anywhere, the futurists figured, why would they subject themselves to the traffic and noise of urban life? They could easily move their screens to a mountain chalet, beach house or Mediterranean cafe.

The opposite happened. Instead of spreading out, many members of the “creative class” scrunched themselves into a handful of acres in a few select cities. As a result, housing prices have exploded in London, New York and San Francisco — and are rising fast in Boston, Seattle, Denver and other centers for tech and finance. The elite apparently want to be around good restaurants, high-end shopping and other elites.

And so what happens to the longtime residents of modest means and new arrivals serving the gentry’s needs? When an influx of genius coders pushes small-apartment rents into the thousands, working families of four get pushed out.

The solution to the high cost of shelter is to increase the supply, say some economists, real estate interests and politicians owned by the real estate interests. In cities bounded by water, that means increasing population density.

That can be part of the answer. Some decaying industrial areas may be ripe for new development. But here’s the problem:

Many of the most desirable urban neighborhoods are desirable precisely for their quirky small houses and low-slung apartment buildings. Local shops and restaurants line their main streets. Replace these structures with a forest of sterile towers and you destroy what made these areas valuable in the first place.

Zeroing in on London, The Economist blames “faulty land-use regulation” for the city’s high cost of housing. It prescribes building on the “green belt,” which was created to preserve open space around the central city — and scoffs at rules protecting views of the iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Guess only the penthouses would have the views.)

Like much of the “build, baby, build” crowd, the magazine parades its agenda behind the banner of diversity and fighting income inequality. Well, let’s ask. Would turning our old cities into soulless Singapores make these places more affordable?

The Economist complains that population density in central London is only half that of New York. Thing is, the rent for a centrally located one-bedroom apartment is 22 percent higher in New York than in London. In hot real estate markets, increasing supply can also hike demand.

For example, building booms in Williamsburg and other gentrifying parts of Brooklyn have attracted more moneyed people while leveling the tenements where poorer folk used to live.

There are remedies for the high cost of housing. One is to move elsewhere. It could be to a lesser neighborhood or nearby town served by public transportation. (Clamor against high rents tends to focus on upscale districts.)

And don’t forget the other great metropolises in this vast land of ours. Columbus, Omaha, Nashville, Baton Rouge and Spokane, to name a few, cost a lot less. They have great bars, hip districts and housing to die for.

As for the lower-income residents who remain in expensive cities, one fix is to pay them commensurate with the cost of living. A $15-an-hour minimum wage in the pricier locales makes total sense.

In sum, the notion that only a handful of ZIP codes can quench 21st-century ambitions is strange. The technology that lets Cleveland make video calls to Honolulu ought to be used. As for mingling, there’s now a Starbucks everywhere.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: A man pauses in a park along the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey April 7, 2016, as the skyline of New York’s Mid Town Manhattan and the Empire State Building is pictured during sunset. Picture taken April 7, 2016. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

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