Ep 115 - You’re Angry at the Wrong People

A lot of Americans are angry right now, and they have every right to be. Housing is brutally expensive. Groceries cost more. Healthcare costs too much. Plenty of people have jobs and still feel like they are barely keeping their heads above water. Young adults are struggling to buy homes, start families, or build the kind of economic security their parents once took for granted. The pain is real. The frustration is real. The mistake is assuming the people we have been taught to blame are necessarily the people who caused it.

Misdirected anger keeps the people with the least power in the crosshairs while the people with the most power stay out of sight.

That distinction matters, because American politics has become extraordinarily good at taking legitimate grievances and attaching them to convenient villains. Immigrants. Transgender people. Teachers. Muslims. People receiving public assistance. DEI programs. College students. Women seeking abortions. There is always somebody nearby with less money, less influence, and less political power who can be presented as the reason your life has gotten harder.

Take the cost of living. Americans do not need economists to tell them prices are high. They see it every week. And one of the most frustrating political responses has been pointing to falling inflation and acting as though that means prices went back down. It does not. Lower inflation usually means prices are increasing more slowly. The groceries that jumped in price during the inflation surge did not magically return to what they cost five years ago.

Conservatives are not wrong that government spending can contribute to inflation. Energy policy matters. Regulation can impose costs. But those are pieces of a much larger story involving pandemic supply disruptions, sudden shifts in consumer demand, global energy shocks, housing costs, tariffs, labor shortages, monetary conditions, and, in some industries, concentrated corporate pricing power. “Biden did it” makes a great slogan. It does not make a serious economic analysis.

Housing may be the clearest example of how a partial truth gets inflated into a complete explanation. Immigration does increase housing demand. That is real. More people require more places to live, and when supply cannot adjust quickly enough, rents and prices can rise. But that does not explain decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning, permitting problems, high land and construction costs, elevated mortgage rates, or communities that demand more affordable housing while fighting almost every attempt to build it nearby.

There is also a contradiction at the heart of American housing policy that politicians rarely like to acknowledge. We want homes to become more affordable for first-time buyers, but millions of current homeowners depend on rising home values to build wealth. Those goals can collide. Donald Trump made his preference fairly clear when he said he did not want housing prices to fall because he wanted current homeowners to preserve the value of their homes. That may be good news if you already own one. It is considerably less comforting if you are trying to buy your first.

So yes, immigration can add pressure to the housing market. But if a politician tells a 28-year-old that immigrants are the reason he cannot afford a starter home while simultaneously promising current homeowners that he will protect high home values, perhaps the diagnosis deserves another look.

Jobs provide another example. We often talk as though employment itself proves economic security. It does not. A person can have a job and still have unstable hours, inadequate pay, no retirement plan, no paid leave, and no affordable health insurance. Part-time workers are particularly likely to lack employer-sponsored coverage, and some jobs structure hours or employment status in ways that leave workers outside conventional benefit systems. “Get a job” is not much of an answer when the job does not provide the thing you are supposedly getting it for.

And even when politicians announce thousands of new jobs, it is worth asking what kind. Data centers are a perfect example. Large projects can employ thousands of construction workers, and those are absolutely real jobs. But the permanent workforce needed to operate the facility can be dramatically smaller. The federal government’s own Paducah data-center project was promoted with roughly 8,000 construction jobs but about 600 permanent jobs. The question is not whether those construction jobs matter. They do. The question is whether voters are being encouraged to hear “8,000 jobs” and imagine 8,000 permanent careers.

Healthcare may be the most absurd area in which we routinely blame people with little control over the system. Americans pay premiums, deductibles, copays, prescription costs, and hospital bills that can be financially devastating even when they are insured. Yet the political conversation frequently drifts toward undocumented immigrants using emergency rooms or people receiving Medicaid, as though that explains the basic structure of American healthcare costs.

Meanwhile, hospitals consolidate. Physician practices get bought by hospital systems. Insurers grow larger. Pharmaceutical pricing remains opaque. Pharmacy benefit managers sit between drug companies, pharmacies, insurers, employers, and patients. Administrative complexity multiplies. Greater consolidation can give large healthcare systems more bargaining power without necessarily producing better care. These are not culture-war problems. They are structural problems involving markets, incentives, and political power.

If an insured middle-class family opens a medical bill for thousands of dollars, the central question should not be which refugee used an emergency room. It should be who set the price, who negotiated the contract, who owns the practice, who controls the insurer, and who helped create the rules governing the system.

Education follows the same pattern, although this one makes me particularly angry. American schools have genuine problems: chronic absenteeism, teacher shortages, behavioral issues, learning loss, mental-health needs, funding disparities, and families under enormous economic pressure. But listen to the political right long enough and you would think the central threat to public education is an army of teachers plotting to indoctrinate children with pronouns and rainbow flags.

I do not buy that argument. Are there bad teachers? Of course. There are bad doctors, bad cops, bad accountants, bad lawyers, and bad podcasters. School administrators can make dumb decisions. Parents can have legitimate complaints. Curriculum can be inappropriate. None of that makes teachers the central cause of America’s education problems.

I know too many teachers, and I have heard too many stories about what they are actually facing: overcrowded classrooms, children with serious behavioral needs, students coming to school hungry or exhausted, endless paperwork, insufficient support staff, teachers buying classroom supplies with their own money, and schools being asked to solve problems that begin far outside the schoolhouse door. Personal stories are not data, but the national data on absenteeism, staffing shortages, and student needs reinforce the broader picture. Teachers are often not creating these problems. They are the people expected to manage the consequences.

Then there is crime. Crime matters. Victims matter. A family devastated by murder does not care that a national statistic improved. Local conditions can worsen even when national trends improve. But national numbers still matter when politicians describe the country as a whole, and the FBI’s latest figures show substantial declines in violent crime and murder. That reality deserves to exist alongside the horror stories that dominate cable news.

Immigrants commit crimes. Undocumented immigrants commit crimes. When they do, prosecute them. But individual crimes are not evidence that immigrants as a group are driving American crime. Large-scale research has repeatedly failed to support the idea that immigrants are unusually crime-prone compared with native-born Americans. Yet one horrific case can dominate political coverage for weeks because human beings respond to stories more powerfully than they respond to spreadsheets.

That is how the pattern works. Start with something real. Attach a face to the fear. Repeat it until the face becomes the explanation. Before long, the immigrant is responsible for housing, crime, wages, hospital costs, overcrowded classrooms, and anything else that happens to be going wrong that week.

And that brings us to the question beneath all of these debates: who actually has power? Immigrants do not generally write tax law. Transgender teenagers do not negotiate hospital contracts. Teachers do not decide whether factories move overseas. SNAP recipients do not approve corporate mergers. Muslim families do not set mortgage rates. Women seeking abortions do not determine whether a data-center developer receives tax incentives.

This does not mean powerful institutions automatically caused every problem. Corporations are not guilty merely because they are corporations. Government agencies are not responsible simply because they have authority. Unions are not always right. Wealth does not prove culpability. The point is to trace the mechanism. Who made the decision? Who set the price? Who wrote the rule? Who had leverage? Who benefited? And how much does the person we are blaming actually explain?

There does not have to be a secret meeting where billionaires and political strategists decide who Americans should hate this week. The incentives are enough. Politicians discover which grievances motivate voters. Cable networks discover which stories keep viewers watching. Advocacy groups discover which controversies raise money. Social-media algorithms discover which emotions keep people scrolling. Economic interests discover which policies protect their position. Those incentives can reinforce one another without anyone needing to send out a memo.

Culture-war politics is especially useful because it gives us visible villains. A migrant at the border. A transgender athlete. A teacher at a school-board meeting. A college protester. A woman walking into a clinic. Those images are emotionally powerful. “Market concentration” is not. “Regulatory capture” does not fit nicely on a campaign hat. “Healthcare consolidation” will never draw a roaring crowd at a rally.

But if we actually want to solve problems, we have to get past the easy villain. We have to ask harder questions about institutions, incentives, laws, markets, lobbying, wages, housing supply, healthcare consolidation, employer power, and political choices. Those answers are messier. They are also much more useful.

The reality check is not that Americans are wrong to be angry. It is that anger without an accurate diagnosis is easily manipulated. A person can correctly identify the pain and still be completely wrong about what caused it.

So the next time somebody tells you that your life is harder because of somebody with less money, less influence, and less political power than you have, ask one more question. Who actually had the ability to make the decision I am angry about?

Do not stop at the immigrant. Do not stop at the teacher. Do not stop at the trans kid. Do not stop at the family receiving food assistance. Keep going. Follow the evidence. Follow the incentives. Follow the money. Follow the power.

The lie is not that you are hurting.

The lie is who you have been told to blame.

SOURCES

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Consumer Price Index, July 2026 BLS CPI — July 2026

Federal Reserve — Monetary Policy Report, July 2026; inflation, tariffs, energy prices, and consumer prices Federal Reserve Monetary Policy Report

Congressional Budget Office — Immigration surge and its effect on housing demand and the housing shortage CBO — Immigration and Housing Demand

Congressional Budget Office — Housing-market conditions, home prices, mortgage rates, and limited inventory CBO — Housing Market Analysis

Associated Press — Trump’s position on maintaining home prices and the conflict between homeowner wealth and buyer affordability AP — Why Trump Doesn’t Want Home Prices to Fall

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Real Earnings, July 2026; real average hourly earnings down 0.2% year over year BLS — Real Earnings, July 2026

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Productivity and Costs, second quarter 2026; labor share at 52.9%, lowest in the series beginning in 1947 BLS — Productivity and Costs

KFF — Part-time workers’ access to employer-sponsored health insurance; only 19% covered through their own jobs KFF — Part-Time Workers and Employer Coverage

KFF — 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey; average family premium of $26,993 and average worker contribution of $6,850 KFF — 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey

U.S. Department of Energy — Paducah data-center project; approximately 8,000 construction jobs versus 600 permanent jobs DOE — Paducah Data Center Project

U.S. Government Accountability Office — Physician and hospital-system consolidation, healthcare prices, spending, and quality GAO — Health Care Consolidation

Reuters — Aon projection that U.S. employer healthcare costs will rise 9.5% in 2027 to more than $19,000 per employee Reuters — Employer Healthcare Costs in 2027

U.S. Department of Education — Chronic absenteeism; approximately 28% of students chronically absent in 2022–23 and documented contributing factors Department of Education — Chronic Absenteeism

U.S. Department of Education — Nationwide Teacher Shortage Areas data Department of Education — Teacher Shortage Areas

FBI — 2025 Reported Crimes in the Nation; violent crime down 9.3%, murder down 18.1%, robbery down 18.5%, murder rate 4.1 per 100,000 FBI — 2025 Crime Statistics

National Bureau of Economic Research — Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-born, 1870–2020 NBER — Immigration and Incarceration Study