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I almost didn't write this, because from my perspective, "In a world where most people don't have coherent thoughts on Topic X, here's a politician who also doesn't have coherent thoughts on Topic X," may be a bit boring. I decided to write it anyway, because it gives a quick hook to the root of the issue, and I might as well lay it out in detail somewhere.
So, Trump speaks on the price of housing. For some societal context, there has been a bit of a movement toward trying to lower the cost of housing. YIMBY is oriented somewhat in this direction; I've even heard the phrase "Housing Theory of Everything" describing the perspective the high housing costs have a variety of other knock-on effects, and so it would be desirable to lower the cost of housing.
Trump highlights the core of the problem. He doesn't want to lower the value of "existing" housing. "People who own their home" should be kept wealthy with high house prices. But the kicker is that there's no way to economically separate the value of "existing" housing and the "people who own their homes" from, uh, "non-existing" housing? As sure as the day is long, if you have a stock of houses, each worth $1M, and then conjure out of thin air a plentiful amount of previously "non-existing homes" that only cost $500k to buy but are otherwise just as desirable, what's going to happen when an existing homeowner decides to sell their house? They'll list it for $1M, but all the potential buyers will look at that, look over at the same deal for only $500k, look back and think, "WTF? Why would I spend that much?" They're going to buy the cheap one. And so, if the existing homeowner wants to successfully sell his home, he will have to lower the price.
...but since everyone already knows that he would have to lower the price (since the price of whatever magical disconnected-from-existing-housing has been lowered), then everyone already knows that the "value" of that existing home is, uh, lower. These things are obviously connected; you can't just hold one constant and tweak the other.
I continue to maintain that the vast majority of folks out there simply do not have a coherent view on the simple question, "Should the cost of housing be higher or lower (or, I guess, the same)?" They want to magically keep the value just exactly as high or higher for existing homeowners, but somehow magically make housing otherwise generally cheap.
You can try (and oh boy does the government try) to come up with ways to just throw cash at the problem, but these efforts generally run into two major types of problems. First, that cash has to come from somewhere. Almost always, that's taxes. Who do you think is paying those taxes? This one we might file under the "obfuscation theory of government". If you hide it well enough that people don't realize that the cash being thrown at the problem to make it look like their right pocket is just as wealthy as it ever was is in fact coming out of their left pocket, they just might not realize?
Second, most schemes end up having to play endless whack-a-mole for the follow-on effects if they want to maintain general cheap housing while keeping house prices high. For example, all the business about throwing cash at first-time home buyers. Some of that reduces the cost to folks who don't own a house, and some of that increases the price of the houses (going to the sellers), and that seems like it could just solve the problem, right?
Well, consider a renter. They're not getting the bag of cash thrown their way. But the price of the houses that they'd like to rent are going up. So their rent is going up. So the cost of "housing" isn't going down for them. Are you going to play whack-a-mole and start subsidizing rent, too? This way Venezuela lies. What if you just jack up the FTHB cash-throw? Just accept that renting is going to be basically infeasible, because getting into the home-borrowership (to use a phrase from Arnold Kling) carousel is now too economically attractive in comparison. Sure, you'll end up with fake and gay high house prices, but everyone "gets in", right? But even then, your 'wealth' is fake and gay. Suppose you want to sell your house and reap the sweet sweet value that you have. Well, where are you going to live? Renting is infeasible (by design). Are you going to buy a different house that also has a fake and gay high price? Suddenly, your gainz disappear. All the while you're paying more interest, more property tax, and more transactions costs (that realtor still costs 3% of a fake and gay high price).
Someone will surely try to come up with this scheme and that scheme to whack this mole or that mole, but I press X to doubt that you can technocrat your way to a solution, especially one that doesn't cost gigantic bags of cash coming out of the general treasury (and ultimately, taxpayers' pockets).
The fundamental question, "Should the cost of housing be higher or lower (or, I guess, the same)?" confuses a lot of people and is probably one of the core problems of our time that produces a multitude of political dysfunction.
I don't see how the US will ever be a manufacturing country when a house for an engineer in a city is a million dollars, medical insurance for a family is 2000+ dollars a month and an engineering degree starts at 100k dollars. Being a country built on assets being inflated to the moon is incompatible with manufacturing.
China wanted its bubble to pop because BYD's engineers can rent condos for far less per square meter than what GM engineers can.
Further more the US birthrate is 1.6 children per woman. That is an almost 25% drop in population over the course of one generation. This is while the construction industry continues to pump out housing. This is pretty much a commitment to continued mass immigration.
I think the only viable option here, which maybe is the needle Trump is trying to thread, is to stagnate housing prices while everything else inflates around them. A sudden drop in asset price is bad (underwater mortgages), but a slow loss in relative value --- in your example, house still $1M, but so is starting salary --- could at least be palatable to existing homeowners and approve relative affordability.
That could work, but with how sticky wages have been relative to inflation it's a risky move.
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