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BREAKING: Trump Shivs GOP Congress, Refuses to Sign Bipartisan Housing Bill | Receipts Live
00:15:15
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, I'm Katherine Rampel here with the Bulwark for your weekly receipts Live Fix. JVL is off this week, so I have the delightful pleasure of welcoming in two of my friends, Martha Gimbel and Natasha Sarin, who are joining me today. They are both affiliated with the Yale Budget Lab. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but Martha is officially the executive director and. And Natasha's president. Is that right? Feel free to correct me if that's wrong. Yeah, they are also fellow theater nerds, econ nerds. We actually have, like, a whole group chat going, which I hope they don't. I hope I don't embarrass you guys in mentioning, but the Sutton Foster Fan Club, in which. Cause, you know, all of the, like, econ theater nerds find each other and we spend, like, half of it, I would say, talking trash, talking econ, bad econ policies, and, like, maybe half of it talking about Sondheim or whatever. Lately it's been a lot more Platner stuff, which maybe we may or may not want to get into, like to
- [01:08]
B
transition back to the Sutton Foster of it all.
- [01:13]
A
Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see how uncensored we get today. This is their first time, so go easy on our friends here. But both of them are economists and. Excuse me, Natasha also teaches at Yale Law School. So I place at her feet the responsibility of educating the future economic policymakers of America, because somehow they've all gone to Yale Law School, which is maybe something else we can talk about or not talk about. I don't know if you guys are going to want to get into that shit talking your university. In any event, we are going to chat today first about the housing bill and Donald Trump's decision to basically shiv his fellow Republicans by not signing it. Is this bipartisan housing bill. And we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff, some affordability stuff, some affordability. Sloppy listen, I guess I would say, and how that feeds into some of these debates over the future of the Democratic Party. There's obviously some overlap there. K shaped economy, Trump tariffs, all sorts of good stuff. But why don't we start out with just telling our audience what's going on today? So Trump this morning tweeted, and I think we have this tweet, a post confirming he is not going to sign the Road to Housing act, the housing bill which has been. Which has passed both Chambers of Commerce, Congress, Chamber of Commerce, both Chambers of Congress, and with. With pretty strong bipartisan votes. So CLEAR the House 358 to 32 and the Senate 85 to 5. Lots of support. There could have been an easy win, I think, for Republicans. And Donald Trump has gotten in the way, but maybe it'll become law anyway if he doesn't formally veto it. Natasha, I'm just curious if you have thoughts on, like, how big of a deal this is if this bill becomes law.
- [03:14]
B
I think it's going to at 11:59, if he doesn't sign, if that's how I should read this tweet. And I kind of think it's a wild stance for the administration to take because remember that, like, Trump was elected on this. I'm going to lower prices on day one. I'm going to deal with affordability concerns. Everything he's done since coming into office this second term, be it the tariffs, be it the conflict in Iran, is all moving in the opposite direction on affordability. You're in a place where you're raising gas prices, you're raising the prices of basically all goods that we import and even the ones that we produce domestically through these tariffs. And this housing bill is, like, not perfect, and we can talk a little bit about it, but, like, it is something that you could point at that is in the direction of trying to deal with a problem that is very real with respect to housing costs and the share of the household budget that they're eating up. And so, like, I do not quite understand what, why this wasn't, like, an obvious chance to have a signing ceremony and celebrate the fact that you were doing something on the single issue that is most front of mind for the American people.
- [04:23]
A
Yeah, I don't know. Martha, do you have thoughts on what may have motivated this? Is it just like he's throwing a tantrum? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe he thinks it's bad economics. I don't know.
- [04:32]
C
He doesn't say anything about the economics of it. He just seems very focused on the SAVE Act. I mean, I think it's interesting because it is a bipartisan bill that now, despite having passed with bipartisan support, Democrats get to go out there and be like, hey, this is this amazing bill that then the President tried to support. So, like, you're sort of handing the advantage of a bipartisan bill over to the Democrats in a way that I'm not a politician. No one has ever sent me to talk to voters in Ohio. That would be a bad idea. But it's very confusing to me.
- [05:09]
A
Yeah.
- [05:09]
B
I mean, there are pieces of it that are kind of weird. Right. So there's like a bunch of. The focus is in the bill is on the idea that we're not going to have private equity firms buy single family homes, which is like less than 1% of the market and has literally nothing to do with housing affordability. But I don't think there is like grand. I don't think that is the argument for why. Oh, they think that that is like overstated as a focus of the bill and so that's why they're not supporting it. I think a version of what you're describing, which is.
- [05:38]
A
No, it's actually the opposite. Right. Like, Donald Trump wanted stricter limits on the institutional investors. And I think. What was it, the Senate version? I'm trying to remember which version of the bill was. There was one version of this bill. Yeah. The Senate version of the bill had these measures in it that would basically force owners of a lot of single family homes that were meant as rental housing stock to sell it. Right. Like they had to sell it to their owners within seven years or something like that. And there was some concern about whether that. It seemed like that was already stopping developers from continuing on projects that were already in progress. So if anything, it seemed like he wanted more constraints on institutional investors, which that name, institutional investors has always kind of. I know it's like sounds big and scary like oligarchs, but it's like there are landlords who own a lot of homes and they're not that many of them. We're going to get some hate for talking about this, I'm sure. But I mean, there is this interesting
- [06:44]
C
thing, right, where we say that there's something different about rentals that are apartments, but as opposed to rentals that are houses, which, I mean, sort of gets at this broader thing about housing in general, which is just that it's such an emotional thing for people. Right. It is both most people's largest investment and the place where they live want to raise kids. And so the fact that housing affordability has legitimately gotten really, really bad, I think is driving a lot of the dynamics that we're seeing both in the economy and also politically. Which gets back to. Why wouldn't you want to be able to talk about this bill?
- [07:25]
A
Yeah, I don't know. Well, I have one other reason why Donald Trump might not want to talk about this bill. Who was it? It was Punchbowl, I think. We have a clip reported a few months ago that Trump told Speaker Johnson in a private conversation that no one gives a leap about housing, which is
- [07:49]
B
Joss do you know that a quarter of renters in the United States spend more than 50% of their income on housing costs? So like, that is just like, you know, we are where we are. That is like an incredibly out of touch statement and an incredibly out of touch view and reflects, I think, a lack of laser focus on the cost of living issues that are animating our policy discourse.
- [08:13]
A
Well, I would also say it's a bit ironic given where Donald Trump's wealth originates, that like his father made it big developing a lot of housing. Clearly, like, even if he doesn't personally feel the burden of high housing costs, like you would think he gives a bleep about housing because like his, his family fortune depended on it and he understands that it means a lot of things to a lot of people. I don't know, I mean, like, there are a bunch of ways to read this as totally tone deaf and bizarre.
- [08:50]
C
There are also some, like parts of, and here's I'm really going to sound like an economist, like parts of the consumption bundle that people really care about relative to others. And even if they're less expensive, people care, like housing, childcare. Those are very emotional purchases for people. My mother spent a smaller percentage of her income on housing and childcare than I spend on housing and child care. She still really cared about where we lived and she cared about the child. It is just an emotional purchase for people, whether it's renting or owning.
- [09:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and the other question is. So I think my view on this housing bill is that it's kind of more a symbolic victory, like a, it's useful as messaging rather than like actually dealing a lot with affordability, at least in the near term.
- [09:42]
B
Right.
- [09:43]
A
Because the things that are in the bill. We talked about the institutional investor piece of this, which I think is more symbolic than anything else, it allows developers to skip environmental reviews if a house is going up between two buildings that were already reviewed. It allows pre approved housing designs that would need fewer approvals before construction happens. It makes it a little easier to build manufactured homes. So those things are helpful. But like, the biggest blocks for more housing construction as I understand it, are at the state and local level.
- [10:16]
B
Totally.
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A
And it's funny, Catherine, since we're doing
- [10:20]
B
the budget lab, Bulwark takeover, like Martha and I have actually been talking a lot about this because we're trying to think about the ways in which we can use analyze housing policy and what levers the federal government has versus state and local governments. And the reality is on the supply side the constraints are really coming on the state and local level. And so there are things that can be done and some of them are in this bill with respect to how we have competitive grants or can Congress pass a law at. Glazer has said versions of this. Congress should pass a law that says that in certain counties in the country where housing costs are especially expensive, you should be in a place where you're forced to build X number of new homes every year. You know, the constitutionality of those questions is up for debate. But like those types of policies maybe, but really the bulk of the stuff, like the abundance conversation is really about what's happening at the state and local level.
- [11:14]
A
And there's a lot of opposition at this. It's not just that, like there's inertia. I feel like there is active opposition from NIMBYIST groups and others. And you know, part of the, I think part of the abundance conversation is about like how do you keep people from the small, the small population of people who like want to abuse things like environmental law and environmental review, which actually are grounded in public welfare type arguments. Like how do you keep that from being abused by a few people who want to just like hoard all the housing to themselves. And it's really difficult because you'll have like people at the local county commissioner meeting who are very invest that the existing owners, right. Who are very invested in stopping more construction because they don't want more people to move in, they don't want more congestion. They don't, you know, they don't want their, their nest egg to get less valuable, which is what may happen if housing prices fall. Like there are winners and losers from all of that. But it's really hard to deal with the political economy there.
- [12:29]
C
I think housing is also like a perfect example of something that the econ policy wonks find really frustrating. Which is the things that we think will work to solve this, like building more supply will not work tomorrow. Right. Like, even if everyone just kind of like it's still going to take years. Right. Because you can't build houses immediately. And that's really hard. Whereas you know, other policies that I think make economists much itchier, like freezing the rent, rent control, you know, have this kind of immediate effect for people, but you know, are very worrisome about like the long run implications for housing affordability and building out more housing.
- [13:14]
A
Yeah. So, yeah. So I want, this is a perfect transition because I wanted to talk about like why we are seeing the rise of those kinds of promises to the public about rent control freezes or other measures that just do feel like a quick fix literally will stop rents from rising. If you freeze rents but make economists, I would say make them uncomfortable, but that's like two feelings grounded, right? It's like it will, it will hurt the housing, raise the cost
- [13:51]
C
of what you want.
- [13:52]
A
It's counterintuitive. And it's just like an easier fix to kind of say we're, we're not going to let prices go up. And there's been a lot of that, but there's been a lot of discussion again at the state and local level about things like this, but also at the federal level. I know that the candidate who just beat Espiat in the primary here in New York, Valdez, she has pitched a nationwide rent control freeze. I actually, I don't understand the legality of that. I don't. Maybe it's possible, maybe it's not. I just don't know. Natasha, you're the lawyer. Natasha's a lawyer as well as an economist. Overachiever. But anyway, so like, there is some desire to do this at the national level. And I guess the question is, like, there's a lot of this, what I would derisively refer to as sloppyism going around. And I think that's, that's really part of the civil war that's happening, as I said, within the Democratic Party also is happening in the Republican Party. I think in the Republican Party, the, that kind of won over a while ago, and now Democrats are going through the same. I don't know this, this the same gantlet. But so it's not just rent control. It's also things like.