Democrats' affordability plan is just a Bidenomics rerun | Opinion

Democrats lost the 2024 election for one main reason: the high cost of living. After a flood of pandemic-era deficit spending, inflation under President Joe Biden hit a four-decade peak.

In the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Democrats hope to turn the tables on President Donald Trump and win on the same issue. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promises the party's agenda will "drive down the high cost of living in every possible area." But the Democrats' plans will fail, because they treat Trump as the sole cause of inflation and refuse to reckon with the legacy of the Biden years.

The two most concrete planks in Jeffries' affordability agenda are reinstating the enhanced Obamacare tax credits and reversing Republican Medicaid cuts. In other words, Democrats want to return to the Biden-era status quo, the same policies in place when inflation hit a four-decade high.

Democrats want to make a pandemic patch permanent

Democrats created the enhanced Obamacare tax credits in 2021 as a temporary response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now they want to make them a permanent part of America's safety net.

In reality, the subsidies mainly benefited insurance companies. One study found that consumers received only about 34 cents of value for every additional dollar spent on them. Most of the rest was eaten up by higher premiums.

The enhanced credits also fueled a wave of fraud. In 2025, more than a third of Obamacare enrollees paid nothing in premiums. That made it easy for unscrupulous brokers and insurers to sign people up without their knowledge. Insurers then collected the full premium from the government without having to pay claims.

According to the Paragon Health Institute, 35% of exchange enrollees filed no claims in 2024. In Florida, Paragon estimates, nearly five times as many people enrolled in the lowest-income tier as were eligible.

Likewise, many of the recent Medicaid cuts limit insurer profits more than individual health expenses. Insurance companies have been paid to keep people on Medicaid even if the enrollees submitted no claims and didn't even know they were in the program.

One study found 30% of enrollees did not know they had Medicaid. Also, some of the particular Republican Medicaid reforms, including work requirements for able-bodied individuals, are broadly popular with the American people.

Restoring these programs to Biden-era levels would only bloat the health care sector further and increase prices. Making the enhanced credits permanent would cost about $335 billion over a decade on its own, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The only ways to pay for that are higher taxes or more debt, and both drive up the cost of living.

Trump's tariffs gave Democrats an opening

Trump has handed Democrats one indisputable advantage in the affordability debate: his tariffs. After running and winning on a promise to tame inflation, Trump raised the cost of a swath of things Americans buy, from the aluminum in their soda cans and the lumber in their homes to their cars and electronics.

The Democrats' push to end the tariffs, though unlikely to survive a Trump veto, is their best bet on affordability. Yet it suffers from the same blind spot as the rest of their agenda: Trump is the only threat to affordability, and reversing his policies is the only cure.

Inflation under Trump hasn't come close to the Biden-era peak, but at 3.7% in September, it's higher than the 3% rate he inherited. Trump now owns the cost-of-living problem, just as Biden, and then Kamala Harris, owned it before him. The case for a different way out of persistent inflation seems obvious.

Bidenomics is not the answer. It was broadly unpopular, and for good reason. Trump hasn't solved inflation, but turning the clock back a few years, as Democrats propose, should satisfy no one who cares about affordability.

Judge Glock is director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Democrats' affordability plan is just a Bidenomics rerun | Opinion

Reporting by Judge Glock, Opinion contributor / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published October 30, 2026 at 5:02 AM.