beyond the work force
Klobuchar and Demuth Are Debating Housing.
Minnesota’s Problem Is Bigger Than Housing.
Minnesota’s housing debate is too narrow. Amy Klobuchar is focused on building more homes and Lisa Demuth is focused on reducing government created costs, but neither approach fully addresses the real problem: affordability is a system. Housing depends on wages, interest rates, credit, infrastructure, transportation, child care, taxes, regulation and the cost of construction.
My approach would start by following every dollar from dirt to front door, identifying the actual bottleneck, eliminating government burdens that cannot justify themselves, using targeted public investment to unlock private capital, protecting small builders from unnecessary fixed costs and connecting housing decisions to where Minnesotans actually work. Then I would measure the result with a Minnesota Worker Prosperity Index based on after-tax income and the real cost of living in each region. The test is not how many programs government created, how much money it spent or how many regulations it eliminated. Can a working person afford to build a life in Minnesota? That is the standard.