The Washington Examiner tells us that 'keeping up with the cost of living is now the most pressing challenge for households across the country.' I have no quarrel with the diagnosis. What I quarrel with — what I have always quarreled with — is the instinct to treat a macroeconomic ailment as though it were a domestic bookkeeping failure.

The household analogy is the oldest and most seductive error in economics. It says: families must live within their means, therefore the nation must do the same; prices are high, therefore families must spend less. The logic is watertight at the kitchen table and almost perfectly wrong at the national level. When every household simultaneously cuts back to cope with rising costs, aggregate demand contracts, businesses reduce output, wages stagnate further, and the affordability crisis deepens — not despite the thrift, but because of it. This is the paradox I spent a career trying to make legible.

The Examiner's acronym — FRESH, whatever it contains — is not available to me in detail, so I will not pretend to evaluate its specific provisions. What I can say, as inference from the framing, is that 'solutions' pitched primarily at household-level behaviour change (buy smarter, drive less, switch brands) will not move the aggregate needle. The question worth asking is whether real wages have kept pace with productivity, whether housing supply has met demand, whether the fiscal stance of government has been supporting or withdrawing purchasing power from the economy at precisely the moment families need it most.

On the supply side, I am not indifferent to cost-push pressures — energy prices, supply-chain disruptions, the legacy of pandemic-era bottlenecks. These are real. But the political temptation is to fight inflation with demand suppression alone, raising the cost of credit until working families bear the adjustment. That is, to put it plainly, a policy that asks those with the least margin to carry the most weight. A more honest programme would combine targeted public investment — in housing, in clean energy infrastructure, in the productive capacity that raises real living standards — with credible monetary discipline. The two are not opposites; they are complements when sequenced with care.

The deeper point is a moral one. Full employment and affordable living are not luxuries to be distributed after the accountants are satisfied; they are the purpose of an economy. When a political settlement — whether a trade policy, a budget resolution, or an interest-rate path — imposes costs whose long-run consequences fall systematically on those least able to bear them, that settlement deserves scrutiny far harder than a cheerful acronym typically invites. I would welcome the Examiner's FRESH proposal if it passes that test. I reserve judgment until it does.