The Hill is defined as what you have to climb over to get to the truth.

Another silly opinion piece by a fool

Nicole Huyer (stumbles her way ignorantly through this op-ed piece) wants you to believe that Donald Trump is making life affordable again, and she’s put together a pile of statistics and policy claims to make that case. But when you actually look at the data she references—or more accurately, the data she gestures toward without ever quite citing—it all falls apart. This is what happens when a Heritage Foundation researcher writes an op-ed: the conclusion comes pre-determined, and the evidence gets arranged to fit.

Let me show you what I mean.

The central thesis of Huyer’s piece is that Biden-era policies caused the inflation surge of 2021-2022, and that Trump’s deregulatory agenda is now fixing it. The first part of that claim is at least partially defensible as political messaging, but it has almost no relationship to what economists actually understand about what drove prices up. The inflation we saw was global in scope, it was driven by supply chain disruptions from the pandemic, and by corporate profit margins that hit historic highs as companies discovered they could raise prices and consumers would still buy. The Federal Reserve’s own preferred measure, the Personal Consumption Expenditures index, shows this pattern clearly—and you don’t need to take my word for it, because the data is publicly available from the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s FRED database. What you’ll find there is that the inflation spike was a textbook supply-shock event, not the result of any particular administration’s spending priorities.

I notice Huyer mentions “$1.8 trillion in costs” from Biden-era regulations with “nearly three-quarters” attributed to the EPA. These figures come from Heritage Foundation calculations, which is worth noting because Huyer herself is a senior research associate at Heritage’s Roe Institute. When your methodology is produced by your own employer and never independently verified, calling it “research” is generous. The claim that deregulatory savings “may be as high as $907 billion” and “translate to more than $10,600 for a family of four” is even more suspect—the math there involves taking regulatory cost estimates, converting them into consumer prices through a process that wouldn’t survive peer review, and then dividing by four to get a headline number. It’s the economic equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat and then claiming the rabbit was always there.

Then there’s the housing argument, which is where Huyer loses me completely. She argues that deporting undocumented immigrants will “effectively reduce demand for housing” and thereby make homes more affordable. This is the kind of thing that sounds vaguely economic if you don’t think about it for more than three seconds, but when you actually apply basic supply and demand logic, it falls apart. Housing prices have been rising since 2012—yes, 2012, during the Obama administration—because of structural constraints on supply, not because of immigration levels. The S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, which tracks this data going back decades, shows a consistent upward trajectory that predates any recent policy debates. Moreover, undocumented immigrants constitute a meaningful portion of the construction workforce that builds new housing. Removing those workers doesn’t reduce demand for homes; it reduces the supply of homes that could be built to meet that demand. The net effect on housing affordability would likely be negative, not positive. This isn’t a controversial economic claim; it’s just arithmetic.

The wage growth claim deserves attention too. Huyer writes that “4.1 percent wage growth in August and September outpaced inflation, which fell to 2.7 percent in November” as evidence that “Americans’ paychecks are finally going further than they did under Biden.” There are two problems here. First, she’s comparing different months across different time periods, which is a classic sleight of hand—you can’t compare August wage growth to November inflation and call it a coherent trend. Second, the FRED data on real weekly earnings shows that the wage recovery actually began during the Biden administration. Real wages hit a low point in the second quarter of 2022 and have been rising steadily since then. By the third quarter of 2023, real wages had already exceeded pre-pandemic levels. Trump has been president for eleven months. Economic policy effects take years to materialize in wage data. Attributing current wage trends to the current administration’s policies is like taking credit for yesterday’s weather.

What really bothers me about this piece isn’t any individual factual error—though there are several—it’s the underlying structure of the argument. Huyer starts with a conclusion that was clearly established before she began writing, and then works backward to find supporting statistics. The Heritage Foundation has certain policy preferences: deregulation, tax cuts, reduced immigration, and a smaller federal workforce. Every claim in this op-ed serves one of those preferences. The $907 billion figure serves the deregulation argument. The housing-deportation connection serves the immigration argument. The tax cut celebration serves the tax cut argument. None of these claims is presented with independent verification, and all of them flow from an organization that has a vested interest in producing results that favor certain political outcomes.

This is what “advocacy research” looks like when it disguises itself as policy analysis. Huyer is entitled to her opinions, of course, and The Hill is entitled to publish them. But readers deserve to know that they’re reading an opinion piece funded by an organization whose policy prescriptions the piece conveniently supports. When the author works for the think tank that produced the statistics she cites, we’re not in the realm of neutral analysis anymore. We’re in the realm of messaging dressed up as expertise.

The good news is that the data is all publicly available. If you want to understand what’s actually happening with inflation, wages, housing costs, and federal spending, you can look it up yourself at FRED, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the Census Bureau. You don’t need Heritage Foundation interpretations. You can download the CSV files and see the actual numbers. What you’ll find is that inflation was global and multicausal, that wage recovery began before Trump took office, that housing costs are driven by supply constraints that deportations won’t fix, and that the $907 billion figure is an internal calculation from an organization with a clear ideological ax to grind.

Americans are right to be worried about affordability. They deserve economic arguments that can survive scrutiny. What they don’t deserve is a Heritage Foundation op-ed pretending to be something it isn’t.

Works Cited

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items,” FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Employed Full Time: Median Usual Weekly Real Earnings: Wage and Salary Workers: 16 Years and Over,” FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “M2 Velocity,” FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index,” FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Corporate Profits,” FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index,” FRED Economic Data, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI.