“In just the past few weeks, Trump has floated—and senior members of his administration have defended—four policy proposals that would have been loudly denounced as socialist overreach had they come from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. And for good reason. Progressives champion similar big-government policies.
Start with the proposal to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes. This is not conservative policy; it’s the federal government deciding who should be allowed to buy property based on identity rather than on behavior. It substitutes political discretion for voluntary market exchange and treats ownership itself as suspect.
The proposal rests on the false premise that allowing corporate investors to own and subsequently rent out homes is a major driver of high home prices. The practice is supposedly diverting capital away from construction, limiting the number of homes changing hands and crowding out owner-occupiers.
The data say something much different. Depending on the source, institutional investors own only about 1–2 percent of U.S. single-family homes. Estimates from the American Enterprise Institute and HousingWire show that even at the upper bound, this share is far too small to plausibly explain the 50 percent nationwide increase in home prices since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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the idea of ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities, a kind of housing-specific version of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, in an effort to lower mortgage rates. Conservatives spent the last election cycle correctly explaining that subsidizing demand in a supply-constrained housing market only pushes prices higher.
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the proposed 10 percent cap on credit card interest rates. Price controls on unsecured credit don’t make borrowing cheaper; they make it disappear for anyone deemed risky. When banks cannot price risk to certain borrowers, they stop lending to them. But borrowers don’t stop needing credit; they just get pushed into far worse alternatives.”