Welcome Friends to another edition of Wolf Response. I'm your host, Richard Wolf, and I want to talk to you today about what is a genuine housing crisis here in the United States.

Now, on one level, I'm horrified to have to talk to you about this. What really sparked my determination to prepare this for you was the announcement by Treasury Secretary Yellen of a $200 million contribution of the treasury to address the housing crisis. This is the equivalent of confronting an entire state in this country of desperate poverty and announcing with great fanfare that you're going to give $11.14 to help deal with the crisis. People will look at you as if you were crazy, which you would be. I am embarrassed for the United States government. I'm embarrassed for Treasury Secretary Yellen, and let me explain what I mean.

The housing crisis has been brewing in the United States for 30 to 40 years. All kinds of specialists and experts have written reports, many that I read and commented on, documenting this crisis. It's real simple: there are not enough homes for the people of this country who need them. There are especially insufficient homes for young families starting out who don't have a lot of money. The statistics show that the relationship between the average cost of a home and the average income American families are earning has been going in the wrong direction for 35-40 years. In other words, people don't have enough money to afford homeownership, which keeps being presented to people as if it were part of the American dream that they're entitled to if they work hard. Well, it's become more and more unaffordable.

That has forced more and more people to forego owning their own home and rent instead, and so rents have gone crazy. We measure in the United States affordable housing with a simple statistic: housing is affordable, owning or renting, if it doesn't cost you more than 25%, maybe up to 30%, of your income. There are many millions of Americans, many millions, who are spending more than 25% or 30% for their homes, for their housing, and it's been that way.

Now, you will hear conservatives, if you listen to them, explain to you that economics is about supply and demand, and that supply and demand, if allowed to function freely—you know, the free market—will solve all our problems. Wrong. It hasn't solved the housing problem. We've had an imbalance between the demand for housing and the supply of housing that has gotten worse over the last 30 years, not better. The capitalist economy in which we live has not solved that problem, not even come close, and that's a failure. There's no honest way, if you're going to be honest, to get out of that sad reality.

This system, this capitalist system, free enterprises that build housing or not, free banking enterprises that lend people money to buy a house or not, employers who pay you enough to afford housing or not, allowing them all to do their profit-driven, maximizing their benefits as employers ends up with the housing prices we're living with. An honest politician, and we have few of those left, would tell you our system is broken and point to housing as a prime example.

And I haven't even gotten to the extreme failures—the people that are homeless and are more and more in number and visible across this country, the people who aren't homeless but are crowded way too many in too few square feet of housing. No, I could, but I won't. I'm going to talk about the average situation because it's a big, fat capitalist failure, and we ought to be big enough people to say: the most important things in life, food, clothing, shelter, and supporting communities. If housing, shelter is one of them, then on that score alone we ought to be able to say our system doesn't work. That's the reality. That's the real crisis. And as long as we have no honest politicians dealing with it, if all we have is periodic speeches like Secretary Yellen telling us that she's come up with a $200 million—$2 million per state—it's nothing.

I did a little calculation: Elon Musk's assets are $200 billion. Given a 5% return, that's $200 million a week. We don't touch his wealth, we don't touch the income of $200 million. We give that amount—that weekly income of this billionaire is what's available for the entire housing crisis of this country. That's what our Secretary of the Treasury takes us for: idiots, fools. People likely say, "Oh, $200 million is a lot," because they don't understand how piddly it is relative to what is the need. Don't be fooled. This is a system increasingly unable to do what an economic system ought to be able to do simply on the grounds of human decency.

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