Writer Arnold Kling forecast that U.S. policymakers would rely more on demand subsidies while restricting supply, arguing that the approach could worsen affordability rather than ease it.
In a Nov. 5 post on his Substack newsletter In My Tribe, Kling cited Obamacare and Mamdani’s rent controls as policies that, in his view, make affordability harder to achieve. He predicted a deeper reliance on demand subsidies alongside supply restrictions.
Kling said economists and the public disagree about the economy. He said economists point to aggregate measures such as real median income when assessing conditions. Separately, he described the misery index, which combines unemployment and inflation, as lower than at almost any time since people began paying attention to it in the late 1960s. Kling said the younger people most upset with conditions were too young to remember the 2008 financial crisis.
On party politics, Kling said Vice President JD Vance faces competing demands: defending Donald Trump while finding distance from him. He cited Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976 and Al Gore in 2000 as historical cases that came to mind, adding that none won. For Marco Rubio, Kling said the Iran war’s prominence in people’s minds was a political problem.
Kling also said socialist mayors appeared likely in the country’s two largest cities and Washington, D.C. He said they might obtain funding from Democratic governors and a Democratic Congress, while warning that reliance on what he called “Other People’s Money” was close to its limit nationally.
Kling also called for raising the voting age to 21, recalling that the case for lowering it was that people eligible for military service should be able to vote.
