In 2020, the monthly payment on a typical American house was about $1,040.
By last November, it had hit $2,056. That’s double, in the span of five years, for the same house and the same median family trying to buy it.
None of this is a coincidence. We know how we got here. Many of us predicted it.
When the economy shut down in 2020, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to near zero and started creating new money by the trillions. Washington piled on with something like five trillion dollars in stimulus. All that money had to go somewhere, and a whole lot of it went straight into houses—there's a fixed supply of them, and suddenly the entire country was flush with cheap borrowed cash to bid with.
Home prices went vertical.
Then came the second hit. All that new money did what new money always does, and by 2022 we had the worst inflation in forty years. So the same Fed that started the fire reached for the only hose it owns and cranked interest rates back up to fight it. Mortgage rates more than doubled off their pandemic lows.
That means that a young family today gets hit twice by the same institution. The Fed's cheap money inflated the price of the house on the way up. The Fed's rate hikes inflated the cost of financing it on the way back down. Real families are experiencing real suffering as a result, and nobody who works in a marble building has ever lost a single night's sleep over it.
Of course houses are only the visible part of this.
There are always second and third order impacts of bad fiscal policy.
The cost of a home is one of the strongest predictors we have of whether young people marry and start families. A first home is where a marriage gets its footing and where the first baby comes home from the hospital. It’s the first step in “real life.” Price that out of reach, and the whole life that was supposed to form around it gets pushed back too.
Sometimes for good.
A lot of young people have stopped delaying that life and started abandoning it altogether. They run the math and decide that a house and a marriage and kids are for people who grew up in a different world. So they settle for renting a one-bedroom, getting a cat or a gaming PC, and calling it freedom.
The sad truth is that family-formation numbers have been grim for a while now, and this is a big part of the reason.
Of course I don't think any of this is an accident.
You see, the family is the one institution that actually raises free people—it's where children learn who they are before any government or school ever gets its hands on them. So when the people running the money make it twice as hard to start one, they're hamstringing the one system that reliably turns out grounded, independent, healthy adults.
Since parents are the first and last line of defense against those who envision a world where a mentally and emotionally crippled society owns nothing and loves it, it’s no coincidence that every totalitarian government in the history of the world has always targeted the family.
It’s no different today.
A child who grows up watching prices climb without ever understanding the mechanism and motives behind what’s happening becomes an adult who's easy to lie to about it—one who'll nod right along when somebody points at a convenient villain (greedy capitalists!) and sells a shiny new (freedom limiting) program as the cure.
It’s a monstrous deception, but it has worked reliably so they keep running the same play.
Speaking of monsters…
You know that our graphic novels take episodes of the Tuttle Twins cartoon and turn them into full-color hardcovers, but did you know that one of the very first monsters Ethan and Emily ever tangle with is the Inflation Monster?
It’s a big dumb beast who keeps jacking up the price of every prize at the carnival while the kids are trying to save for one.
It's played for laughs, but it's actually a cleaner explanation of what happened to the housing market than most of what passes for grown-up financial news. A kid who spends an afternoon reading our graphic novels walks away understanding why a dollar buys less this year than last, and exactly who's responsible for the change.
And it’s that way with every book in the set, for all four seasons. The monsters are the fun kind of scary—dinosaurs, gold-grabbers, athletic orcs—but every goofy adventure sneaks in a real idea about how money and freedom and the world actually operate. My own kids tore through all of them and then flipped right back to page one, and somewhere in there they picked up things about the economy I didn't figure out until I was paying a mortgage myself.
Our Monster Sale runs through Halloween and includes great deals on some of our best-loved products.
The Season 4 box set just dropped, and you can get them separately to add to your collection, or shop the bundle to start your home library!
(That’s 44 hardcover graphic novels!)
The inflated mortgage payment isn't going to un-double anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.
It isn’t too late to raise a generation of people who know that inflation isn’t caused by greedy companies randomly deciding to charge more for their products. It’s not too late to teach them that “free” money from the government is never actually free. And it’s not too late to teach them the importance of family as the central unit of healthy, happy, and prosperous societies.
Most of that work is going to be done by you, within the walls of your own home. But we are determined to keep making resources that help you teach these civilization-saving lessons to your kids.
Thanks for trusting us to help in the work you’re doing. You’re making the world a better place for all of us.
— Connor
