The Congressional Progressive Caucus Affordability Agenda Is a Dud

The Congressional Progressive Caucus yesterday released their “affordability agenda.” The American people want policies to defuse inflation and lower their living costs, but what they got was a longstanding left-wing wish list dressed up in affordability garb: more subsidies, mandates, price controls, state-directed production, and lawsuits against businesses that charge prices politicians dislike.

The agenda promises to cut costs for prescription drugs, utilities, gas, childcare, housing, and groceries; improve worker wellbeing with more paid time off and higher overtime pay; ban “surveillance pricing”; and abolish super PACs.

Two things stand out straight away from the list of proposals. First, nothing here would lower inflationary pressure as a macroeconomic phenomenon, which is what drove the affordability anger. Second, in specific markets, there’s scant economic analysis of the structural and policy factors that drive high prices. Most proposals implicitly blame villains like Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Grocery, Big Tech, utilities, landlords, employers, and billionaires for high prices. This populism means many simpler ideas to lower prices through expanding supply get ignored.

Start with utilities. The so-called Lowering Utility Bills Act targets regulated monopolies where returns are set by regulators, not markets, and promises to lower bills by squeezing those administered returns further. Allowed equity returns would be pushed to the bottom of a federally defined “reasonable” range and certain cost recovery would be curbed. Disallowing lobbying expenses, political spending, private jets, and penalties from ratepayer bills will be popular, but will only marginally affect rates. The advertised $500 savings per household really depends on the indirect price controls, state regulators adopting similar policies, and the utilities absorbing this without creatively shifting the burdens. This means the savings are uncertain. And as power demand surges from data centers, electrification, and grid modernization, underpricing capital also risks deterring the very investment needed to make electricity cheaper and more reliable over time.

Gas prices are another hot issue today. Ro Khanna and Sheldon Whitehouse want a refundable “gasoline price rebate” income tax credit financed by a per-barrel excise tax on crude oil to ease households’ squeeze. They call it a tax on “windfall profits” because it kicks in when Brent crude prices rise above their 2025 average. But the policy only cushions some households after the fact, and then only when the rebate exceeds any pass-through they endure in higher fuel prices. It doesn’t lower the pump price. Indeed, by taxing barrels precisely when oil is scarce and prices are high — as now with the Iran war roiling global markets — it risks raising the marginal cost of crude supply into U.S. refineries.

Other proposals more obviously risk prices moving in the wrong direction entirely. The proposed clampdown on grocery store “price fixing” just empowers state attorneys general to pursue Robinson-Patman price-discrimination claims. In plain English, this would make it easier to sue suppliers for offering large retailers better wholesale deals than others. But those discounts are often how efficient retailers keep shelf prices low. Introduce that legal risk, and many suppliers won’t extend Walmart’s lower cost deals to everyone. They’ll just end them, worsening affordability.

Similar confusion arises in the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act. It targets personalized online pricing, which unfriendly lawmakers call surveillance pricing and equate with price gouging. But, overall, we’d expect individualized pricing to mean lower prices for thrifty shoppers with a low willingness to pay and higher prices for those happy to pay more anyway. Legislation pressuring more uniform pricing would help the latter group—who would often be those on higher incomes—not those struggling to make ends meet. The net affordability effect for low-income consumers could well be negative.

The labor proposals aren’t really affordability policy at all. The PTO Act would mandate paid leave at one hour per 25 worked, up to 80 hours annually; the double-overtime proposal raises the overtime premium from 1.5x to 2x base pay. Both will benefit some workers. But mandated benefits and higher overtime costs make employing people more expensive. Employers will respond with some combination of higher prices, fewer hours, slowed hiring, lower wage growth, more automation, or less flexibility. You cannot make labor-intensive services cheaper by making labor more expensive.

The childcare proposal pushed by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Warren is even more aggressive in raising labor costs. The Child Care for Every Community Act creates an uncapped entitlement whereby every covered child gets access to federally supported care, the federal government pays at least 90 percent of costs, low-income families pay nothing, and other families are capped at 1 to 7 percent of income. That lowers out-of-pocket costs for parents of eligible kids. But the bill also mandates national standards, richer services, facility rules, training requirements, and compensation comparable to public-school or military child-care pay. In other words: it raises the cost of supplying childcare, then hides the invoice by giving it to taxpayers.

The drug and housing supply ideas at least begin by acknowledging that supply matters. Yet even there, progressives reach instinctively for state capacity over market liberalization. The drug bill creates an HHS Office of Drug Manufacturing to produce select medicines and sell at a government-determined “fair price.” That may help reduce prices in some thin generic markets, at least if (and it’s a big if!) the nationalized producer is efficient. But why not first remove the barriers blocking private generic and biosimilar competition? Why not speed approvals, recognize drugs cleared by trusted foreign regulators, and attack genuine patent games?

Housing follows the same playbook. The ambition for building millions of homes is the one genuinely promising plank. If Congress helped states and localities legalize and accelerate construction where people want to live, that would be real affordability. But the proposed agenda also doubles down on demand-side subsidies like down payment assistance for first-time buyers and guaranteed rental assistance. In a housing market throttled by zoning, permitting delays, parking mandates, and local vetoes, more subsidies throw gasoline on the fire. It helps some homebuyers to bid more, but further drives up market prices for others.

As a national affordability agenda, this is a dud. It is not a plan to make America cheaper by liberating supply in core markets, let alone getting and keeping inflation low. It is a plan to make government bigger and to hide various bills via regulatory-grounded and tax-and-spend redistribution.

As our own Handbook on Affordability showed, there’s plenty of ideas for removing government barriers to supply or competition to lower prices or broaden options for households. At a time when most Americans are angry at the recent price level surge, redistributing high prices across other consumers and taxpayers is not only economically damaging, but also unlikely to ameliorate discontent.