Policy Forum # A Framework for Lasting Affordability ##### Watch the Event Download: [ Video ](https://fastly-unsigned-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6039378657001/f953b432-bb27-4015-b9a1-57cb06c0f8dc/6f1ec6fc-f500-43e3-a4da-6e699e796965/main.mp4) Submit questions in the comment box on this page. For event updates, follow [@CatoInstitute](https://x.com/catoinstitute) on X. If you have questions about the event or your registration, please email [events@​cato.​org](mailto:events@cato.org). #### Transcript *This transcript was generated using AI automation and may contain minor formatting or transcription errors. Please refer to the original audio to verify specific quotes or context.* A Framework for Lasting Affordability Cato Institute event with Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R‑PA) and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D‑NY), co-chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus **Moderator:** Ryan Bourne, Cato’s R. Evan Scharff Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics **Ryan Bourne:** Everyone, welcome to the Cato Institute. My name’s Ryan Bourne, Cato’s R. Evan Scharff Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics. 2026 has been dubbed the year of affordability ahead of the midterm elections. Politicians across Washington are proposing ways to ease the cost of living. But we at Cato think affordability has become pretty much an umbrella term for lots of different grievances. The biggest source of public anger, I think, has been the result of the inflation surge that we’ve seen since 2021. Consumer prices are now twenty-eight percent higher than they were in the first year of the pandemic. And of course, as a result of that, interest rates have risen too, making mortgages, car loans, and credit card debt more expensive. But that inflation shock has also drawn attention to areas where prices are high in specific sectors that people really care about: housing, energy, childcare, healthcare — areas where government policy can often make matters worse. So earlier this year, Cato produced our own handbook on affordability, arguing that these different components of the challenge required different solutions. Sound money and fiscal restraint can help reduce inflation and keep it low, reducing pressure on interest rates. But to our mind, sustainably lower costs require making homes, energy, and services easier and cheaper to provide, and that often requires removing regulations, re-examining taxation, and other barriers that restrict supply and competition. Now, we’re not the only group thinking about affordability. The Problem Solvers Caucus is another group that’s developed a wide-ranging affordability agenda. It’s a bipartisan group committed to finding practical areas of agreement across party lines, and I’m delighted to welcome its two co-chairs today. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, to my immediate right, is a Republican representing Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District. He serves on the House Ways and Means Committee — a very important committee — and the House Intelligence Committee. Representative Tom Suozzi is a Democrat representing New York’s Third Congressional District. He also serves on the Ways and Means Committee too. And their agenda is particularly interesting, I think, because it addresses both the macroeconomic component that I talked about and some of these microeconomic issues too. So representatives, your agenda starts with quite an admission. It says both parties are responsible for at least part of the affordability challenge we now face. But I want to know: when you go back to your districts, when ordinary voters tell you that they’re struggling with the cost of living, what do you really think they’re getting at when they highlight that affordability challenge? Is it just the legacy of inflation? Is it specific sectors? How do you interpret this, and how do you narrow down what you’re trying to achieve? **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Well, I think it’s how hard is it for them to make basic ends meet, right? Half the country, perhaps more, live paycheck to paycheck, and they are sitting down at the kitchen table every week — sometimes more often than that — figuring out how to make their budgets work. And those are the people that we really need to be mindful of when we’re making policy decisions. And when we talk about affordability, it’s kind of become a buzzword. And oftentimes when that happens, you get away from actually understanding what’s at the root cause of it. Really, I think it’s three things: it’s the cost of products and goods, it’s supply and demand, it’s interest rates. But I think the most important component of it is what side of the ledger you’re on in terms of compound interest. Is compound interest working for you — meaning you have money to invest and it’s working to benefit you? Or are you on the other side of the ledger, where compound interest is working against you because you have credit card debt or other debt, and you’re paying interest on existing debt? And that dichotomy is really the bifurcation mark, I think, in our economy and our society in terms of how hard it is for people to get ahead. **Ryan Bourne:** Now, there’s probably one area of bipartisan agreement, unfortunately, on Capitol Hill: it’s to run large budget deficits year after year. But an area that the Cato handbook and your affordability agenda agree on is that large budget deficits and unsustainable long-term fiscal projections are putting pressure on families’ budgets already through the interest rate channel — arguably through the inflation channel that we’ve just lived through as well. How do we start turning that question around? How do we start getting the rest of the policymaking community in DC interested in trying to reduce budget deficits? **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Part of the deficit issue is educating the public that high deficits cause upward pressure on interest rates. So when you have high interest rates, it’s hard to buy a house. When you have high interest rates, it’s hard to lease a car. When you have high interest rates, it’s harder for you to borrow to buy goods for your company, for your small business. So we need to do a better job educating the public that deficits — which just seem like, “Hey, it’s a Washington thing, deficits, they’re always talking about deficits and debt” — are actually affecting your life. The massive deficits we are experiencing right now, actually record deficits right now, are having a tremendous upward pressure on interest rates and on inflation as well. So we just need to do a better job of connecting the dots. And one of the things that Brian and I support is the idea of a fiscal commission to look at the deficit and come up with a solution in a bipartisan way. Because everybody — we can have all these debates back and forth. I’m trained as a CPA, but you don’t have to be a CPA to know that there’s only two choices — **Ryan Bourne:** Oh, Brian’s trained as a CPA also. **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** We’re both CPAs and lawyers. That’s one of the things we share in common with each other. There’s only two choices: raise revenues or cut expenses. That’s it. There’s no — **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Or both. **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Or both. There’s no other magic. You either have to come up with more money for the federal government or reduce the expenses, or a combination of both. And of course, it’s gonna require a combination of both to solve this problem. **Ryan Bourne:** So let me ask you about that, because your caucus has endorsed a couple of different potential pieces of legislation — the Fiscal Commission Act and the Sustainable Budget Act. Now, they’re quite different in the way they go about dealing with this problem. The first sets a target for the debt-to-GDP ratio that economists tend to care quite a lot about, and tries to make entitlements solvent over the long run. But it puts a lot of power in the hands of the commission itself, whereas the Sustainable Budget Act is much more about trying to balance the day-to-day federal budget within a decade and giving the president considerable control. Now, they’re very different proposals, but I’m guessing the reason you’ve endorsed both of them is because at this stage you’re really trying to bring attention to the issue. But what red lines would you say are necessary in the formation of any commission? What would you be looking for it to achieve? **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Well, number one, I think ideally it’s set up like the 9/11 Commission, which I think is really the model commission, at least in my lifetime. They came up with 41, 42 recommendations. They were entirely bipartisan, equally bipartisan, no currently serving elected officials. And for any subpoena to issue, any decision to be made, it had to be a two-party solution — it had to be bipartisan. And they came up with tremendous recommendations that, thankfully, have kept a terror attack from occurring on our shores for 25 years. So I think that’s really the model. And, you know, you pointed out the difference of the two bills — one deals more with the long-term debt, the other deals more with current, annual budget deficits — and we have to tackle both, and we have to look at the debt-to-GDP ratio. I believe it ought to be a percentage rather than a numeric dollar amount, because all Congresses have kept doing for decades is lifting it. And if you’re gonna have a debt ceiling — which it’s arguable whether you should, because basically the argument there is you’re debating whether or not you should pay debts you’ve already incurred, which doesn’t seem like a very logical debate to me — it should be a percentage of GDP, because there have been two times in our nation’s history where the debt-to-GDP has exceeded 100%: World War II and today. And unfortunately, a lot of the advantages that we had coming out of World War II — like demilitarizing, bouts of low inflation, high economic growth — we’re facing headwinds on all of those different fronts right now. **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** I want to go back to your first question that you asked Brian — I didn’t answer that question. It’s very important for us to recognize that for some Americans, the economy is booming, and it’s been booming for 50 years. The Dow Jones has gone up dramatically over the past 50 years. The GDP has gone up dramatically over the past 50 years. The problem is that we’ve concentrated the wealth amongst a smaller portion of the population, and another part of the population has just been left behind. There are a lot of people who go to work every single day. They work really hard, at least 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, and they get two weeks vacation — many people working more than that, husbands and wives, spouses working. But there are two different worlds that we’re living in. And so when they talk about the K‑shaped economy — I don’t know if it’s backwards this way, but a K, you know — you’ve got one group going up and they’re really happy, and one group going down and they’re really unhappy. It’s a tale of two cities, completely different. The stock market is booming, corporate earnings are coming in fantastic, and they’ve been doing well for years. But we’ve hollowed out the middle class, and we have a lot of good programs that protect the lowest-income Americans, but we’ve just abandoned this chunk of people in the middle. And they’re unhappy, and they’re looking for an answer. And the solutions being offered to them, whether from the MAGA movement or the DSA movement, are like: the whole system stinks, the whole system’s rigged, let’s tear the whole thing down. And those messages have been appealing to people. I think that Brian and I are in similar camps in that we think that’s not the answer — just to tear everything down. The answer is we have to fix what’s broken in a system that’s not working for a lot of Americans. I’m not defending the status quo, okay? The status quo is not working for a lot of Americans. We have to fix this hollowing out of the middle class, and it’s gonna require us to do a better job articulating solutions to those problems, recognizing the status quo isn’t working. But tearing the whole thing down is not gonna work either. **Ryan Bourne:** Yeah, and there’s a lot of false solutions out there too. You know, both parties have had senior people advocate various forms of price controls, which we know as economists tend to have very deleterious effects on economic activity. Lots of new subsidies that are mainly about transferring the cost from one group to another rather than dealing with the underlying problems. So let’s move on to some of those specific underlying problems — **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Can I say one other thing? I’m sorry — I’m just reading this now, I haven’t even discussed this with you before. A lot of very wealthy people are paying a lot in taxes — people who are making a million dollars a year or two million dollars a year or even more than that, but they’re getting it as a salary, as a lawyer or a doctor — they’re paying a lot of taxes. That’s not the problem. The problem is the people who have accumulated wealth and are having enormous wealth accretion, but they don’t take any salary from it. They don’t sell any of their assets, so they don’t have to pay capital gains, and they’re living off of borrowing — so they can deduct their interest expenses. But they have this enormous wealth, they’re accreting value, but they’re not paying much in taxes because they’re not taking it out. That’s what we have to figure out how to solve. **Ryan Bourne:** I think tax reform’s probably one of the areas that would be most difficult to find agreement on in Washington. But one area where, at least if you believe prediction markets, there’s a pretty good chance of doing something, is on permitting reform — **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Yes — **Ryan Bourne:** — for energy. You have a lot about this in your agenda: strict deadlines, judicial review, less duplication for linear infrastructure, and being neutral across all forms of energy generation — trying to get as many new projects of as many different forms of energy generation as possible. We similarly think that delay and litigation risk are major barriers to getting abundant, reliable, cheaper energy. So when you think about that seeming likely over the next year, where do you think there are possible areas where we can get bipartisan reform? What are the big things you’re looking for in the energy area over the next 12 months? **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** I’ll take that, Tom. It’s really — we have to make it easier to build things. **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Yeah. And there’s a Democrat named Scott Peters, used to be the mayor of — was it San Diego or La Jolla? Anyway, he was a mayor, he’s a get-things-done type of guy, and I’ve asked him to really take the lead on this, and I’d defer to him on a lot of the specifics — but he’s also working with a Republican on Problem Solvers. And we brought environmental groups in to meet with us, just on the Democrats’ side. And we said, “Listen, we have to fix this problem.” The need for energy has either been flat or going down over the past 20 years, and for the first time in 20 years, the demand for energy is going up dramatically because of data centers particularly. So we’ve got this rising demand and we don’t have a commensurate increase in supply. And I’m upset about a lot of the projects that were canceled that were funded under — I forget the name of the bill now — the Inflation Reduction Act, inappropriately named, that canceled all the green energy credits. So at a time when we have increasing demand for energy, we cut some of the potential supply. But what I said to the environmentalists is, “We have to make it easier to build things.” For every 10 projects, you’re gonna end up with seven or eight green projects and some fossil fuel projects as well, but so be it — we have to build more energy supply in our country. And to do that, we have to reduce some of these barriers in permitting. So we need dramatic permitting reform. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** This has been a really fascinating development — that permitting reform has become a bipartisan issue, which we think is great news. It’s interesting to see how it came to fruition, because permitting reform historically was associated with fossil fuels — you saw a lot of people more aligned with the right pushing permitting reform to advance pipelines or what have you. Now, with the expansion of green energy and renewable energy, a lot of our Democrat colleagues who wanted to see programs like those advanced in the IRA and the ARP move forward, need permitting reform too. So you’ve now got a bipartisan issue on the need to cut the red tape and speed up the process to allow these projects to come to fruition. But to Tom’s point, if you believe in “all of the above” in order to meet our demand, because we have a supply-and-demand issue — that’s why we’re seeing energy costs go up — that’s one key way to do it, and it’s a good development to see it become a two-party issue. It’s important to understand where a lot of these protections — or regulations, depending on how you view it; one person’s protection is another person’s regulation — come from. If you’ve ever read the book *The Power Broker*, about Robert Moses — who’s read that book? Okay. So in that, he built all these things — enormous projects, mainly in the New York area — and it’s amazing he accomplished so much. But some of the things he did, he’d just put a road right through the middle of somebody’s neighborhood, and it divided the neighborhood in half and destroyed its character. And so people said, “We have to put rules in place to prevent this from happening. We have to get input from the community, look at the history of the area.” So now we have all these rules in place. The same thing happened with the environmental movement — before it, up through the ’60s and ’70s, there was a violent reaction against all these bad things that were happening, so we put all these rules in place. Then we started enforcing them in the ’80s. In the 1990s we realized we had to start implementing them. And then we realized it’s become very difficult to get things done. Now we’re finally coming around to: well, we still need protections, but we need to make it easier to do the things we think are positive. This has been a bipartisan problem too — one administration delays or cancels pipelines, the next one it’s wind or transmission projects. So — **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Yeah — **Ryan Bourne:** — it’s really hopeful that we’re actually seeing some bipartisan agreement about the need for permitting reform, and hopefully to try to take some of that presidential veto power away from these projects. Now, one area where my Cato colleagues have been pushing quite hard relates to the data centers you just talked about, because we’d like to see the permitting reform process fold in principles that say: if a new data center or factory wants to bring on its own power — kind of become a “grid of one,” or share that power source with a couple of other factories — we should look at reforming regulations and the way the electricity system works to allow them to do that, so that those pressures are less on the formal grid and something they can absorb into their own manufacturing process. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but that might be an area worth exploring as you continue to look at this issue. Now, one area where we have seen a bipartisan accomplishment of late is on housing. We’ve just seen the 21st Century Road to Housing Act become law on July 11th. Our scholars here at Cato have mixed feelings on the legislation — they really like some of the deregulatory aspects, and are a bit more uncertain about the effectiveness of reforming some of the existing federal programs that we opposed to begin with. But it does do a number of deregulatory things. So which parts of it do you expect to result in actual more house building, as opposed to just changing who receives help for their housing, or how those homes are financed? What bits are you really excited about for increasing the supply of homes? **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Well, I’m excited personally about the expansion for veterans — both the expanded use of VA loans and the expansion of the home availability they’re eligible for. I like what it does for lower-income people in terms of rental assistance and expanding their opportunities there. Personally, I think in terms of biggest impact — and not many people are tracking this — just allowing builders to offer up pre-approved plans, rather than having to go through that process over and over again. It sounds like a minor detail, but that’s gonna have a sea-change effect on that industry. Everybody working in that industry has told me that. It’s a provision nobody’s talking about that I think is actually gonna have the biggest impact on lowering, or at least containing, the cost of housing. **Ryan Bourne:** And how far would you be willing to countenance federal involvement to try to get states and localities to change their own zoning and land-use rules? Because there’s a difficult question there from a federalist perspective. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** That would be — in my particular district, that would be the kiss of death. You’re never gonna be able to override local control where I am. But I think the federal government and state governments should be providing incentives to local governments to encourage them to create more density in certain locations, especially in downtowns around mass transit. It’s something I’ve been working on for years. **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Well, I’m home to one of the first suburbs in America — the mass-produced suburbs — Levittown. Brian’s got a Levittown also, in Pennsylvania. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Yeah, that’s something we share in common. **Ryan Bourne:** He lives in Levittown? **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Mm-hmm — I represent Levittown. **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** And Nassau County was one of the first places — we were one of the fastest-growing places in America. Mr. Levitt started Levitt Homes in 1947 as affordable housing for returning veterans. From 1950 to 1960, we went from 400,000 people to 1.2 million people in our county — the fastest-growing county in the country — up to 1.5 million people in the 1970s. Now our population’s actually a little less than that, because we have the same number of homes — we’re suburban-sprawled — but family sizes are much smaller than they were back in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. When you’re suburban-sprawled — I looked at this a lot when I was the Nassau County Executive — we want to keep most of our land mass, literally 95%, even 99%, the same as it is now: single-family homes, parks, open spaces, beaches. But 1, 2, 3% of our land mass, in our downtowns near our train stations, we need to go up and create what I call “cool downtowns” — places where young people can afford to live and where they want to live, where it’s fun. People used to get married in their 20s to their 30s; now if you get married, it’s your late 20s, early 30s. Nobody who’s single in their 20s is looking to move out to suburbia. The things we love about suburbia — it’s quiet, crime is low, everything shuts down at 10:00 at night, we shut the roads down for a Little League parade — young people are gonna say, “That’s boring. I wanna go out to a bar, I wanna meet somebody, I wanna have fun, I gotta get to work in the morning.” We have to create these environments in traditional suburban communities, while preserving the suburban character and quality of life that people moved there for in the first place, but create housing in the downtown areas near mass transit. **Ryan Bourne:** So do you think the recent bill is about as good as it gets, or do you expect other bills to come forward on housing with bipartisan support? **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** I think there’ll be more. First, we need the leadership where people say affordability is the problem — okay, so we’re saying it, Cato’s saying it, many other people are saying it. Some people are still saying that affordability is a hoax. I don’t think that when you go to the grocery store, or the gas station, or have to pay your health insurance premiums, or pay the interest on your mortgage, you think affordability is a hoax — it’s a real issue. So I think there will be more to happen. And I really think that even more than legislation, reducing interest rates is really the biggest thing that has to happen. **Ryan Bourne:** So one area the caucus explicitly recognizes the difficulties in is finding labor in sectors like agriculture, construction, healthcare — I’d probably chuck in childcare as well, and how that raises prices. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Healthcare, another one, yeah. **Ryan Bourne:** You’ve endorsed the Dignity Act, which combines border and asylum measures with mandatory E‑Verify and legal status for certain long-term residents. So I’m guessing you’d argue a serious affordability agenda has to combine resolving the status of people already here with expanding the future legal supply of workers as well. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Absolutely. It — **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Yeah, go ahead. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** Well, we talk a lot about the great power competition, right — between China and the United States, and Russia and Iran and whoever else you want to include. But mostly that’s viewed through a national security lens. The biggest advantage we have is that everybody wants to come here. Nobody’s busting the doors down to move to China or Russia or any of these other countries — everybody wants to come to the United States. We have a potentially endless, limitless labor supply, which isn’t only huge for the affordability issue, it’s important from an economic security standpoint, a national security standpoint — it’ll strengthen our economy. We are a nation of immigrants — all of us, unless you’re a Native American, you are an immigrant to this country; the only question is how many generations back, and what part of the world you can trace your lineage to. It’s made us the greatest country in the world. It’s allowed us to become the world’s economic superpower 103 years after the signing of the Constitution, and the world’s currency standard about 50 years after that, because of this brilliant system of government our founders gave us. Immigration is a big part of that — it’s a big part of our economy, a big part of our country. And it’s been one of the most frustrating things I’ve seen out of Congress, in terms of what’s not happening: you keep hearing this term “comprehensive immigration reform.” How many times has this “Gang of Eight,” this bipartisan, bicameral group, said we’re gonna have comprehensive immigration reform? And because they can’t get 100% of the way there, they get nothing. They can’t break it up into singles and doubles and get incremental victories — and that’s what I believe the Dignity Act does. It’s a two-party bill that’s relatively limited in scope, not huge, but touches on a number of areas. I think we have to view it as a huge advantage we have in this country, that people want to come here — we can attract the best and brightest of every industry if we so choose, and also still let people in who are claiming asylum, which is becoming of American values, but also view it as a huge economic engine for our country. **Ryan Bourne:** Yeah, I mean, a lot of contemporary Republicans would say something like, “Well, if you let in more people, that’s gonna put downward pressure on wages.” But that’s actually not what most of the literature shows — these people are also consumers, and they tend to complement the existing workforce, raising productivity — **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** They’ve been shaping the history of our country, right? **Ryan Bourne:** Yeah, yeah. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** These are the people — immigrants from all over the world helped build America. **Ryan Bourne:** Yeah. And they’re big sources of entrepreneurship and innovation as well. Now, it’d be remiss of me, from a Cato perspective, not to signal where we politely disagree on certain things. You have sections on healthcare, food, and childcare where your agenda proposes tax credits, subsidies, and investigations of food prices. I’d guess we would argue those policies may help some people pay the bill, but they don’t reduce the bill itself — they transfer it to another group, often with some unintended consequences. We tend to focus on liberating supply as much as possible — allowing more qualified foreign doctors here, recognizing safe medicines approved in other parts of the world, removing some of the protectionism we have in tariffs, marketing orders, ethanol mandates, and other things that raise the price of food. But we’re probably not gonna agree on that. Where I’d be interested is how you define success. Economists tend to define affordability as how much you can buy with your incomes. But even prior to the Iran conflict, real wages actually went up on average in 2025, and yet the salience of the affordability issue grew stronger over time. That says to me that people are really annoyed about the widespread increase in prices and the legacy of inflation. But none of us want to countenance deflation — you don’t want to squeeze spending across the economy and risk a recession. So what’s a more tangible target we should actually be looking for? If we came back in a year’s time and reconvened this session, and I asked you, “Was the last year a success in terms of improving affordability?” — how would you define that? What metrics would you look at? **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick:** For me, it’s the values we were brought up with in this country — that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll always be able to afford the necessities: to educate your children, take your family on vacation, do the things that are core to the nuclear family in America. I think that’s the metric of success, and I’d hope we’d all agree it should never be the case that somebody working 40-plus hours a week can’t afford the basic necessities to live. Clearly there’s a breakdown in the system if that’s the scenario. So that’s how I define it. **Rep. Tom Suozzi:** And for me, success is when left-wing progressives and right-wing conservatives all agree that, in return for working hard, you make enough money so you can afford to buy a house, educate your kids, pay for health insurance, and retire without being scared. That’s it. **Ryan Bourne:** Well, this is certainly a topic we’ve explored at Cato over many years. I remember I wrote a paper back in 2018 arguing that a really good, sustainable way to get to a real living wage would be to work through all these different sectors and find ways of lowering the cost of living, rather than always talking about topping up people’s incomes with wage controls or subsidies. So we really appreciate you both being here, and all the work you’re doing on this — really glad to have this engagement. I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for. We’re not gonna have time for questions today, because we have an event starting in here 15 minutes after we leave, so if you could please leave the auditorium immediately after this finishes — imagine there’s a fire or something and try to get out as quickly as possible. But before that, let’s just thank our speakers, Representative Fitzpatrick and Representative Suozzi, for being here — thanks for all you’re doing on this topic. **Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick / Rep. Tom Suozzi:** Thank you. Thank you. Good job. Thanks so much. **Ryan Bourne:** Yeah. Date and Time July 21, 2026 2:30 - 3:15 PM EDT Location Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC Share This Event ##### Featuring ![Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) - circle](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2026-07/Rep.%20Brian%20Fitzpatrick%20%28R-PA%29.jpg?itok=DW0VfpsU) Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R‑PA) First District of Pennsylvania ![Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) - circle](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2026-07/Rep.%20Tom%20Suozzi%20%28D-NY%29.jpg?itok=GxI4YYUX) Rep. Tom Suozzi (D‑NY) Third District of New York [![Ryan Bourne](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2021-01/Ryan%20Bourne.jpg?itok=nv8-2r7d)](/people/ryan-bourne) [Ryan Bourne](/people/ryan-bourne) R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics, Cato Institute [ ](https://x.com/MrRBourne) [ ](mailto:rbourne@cato.org) American families continue to face rising costs for essentials such as housing, health care, energy, childcare, and groceries. While policymakers often disagree on the causes and solutions, bipartisan interest is growing to address the structural barriers that make everyday life more expensive. Join the Cato Institute for a conversation with Problem Solvers Caucus Co-Chairs **Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R‑PA)** and **Tom Suozzi (D‑NY)**, who recently introduced the caucus’ [Bipartisan Affordability Agenda](https://problemsolverscaucus.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=882). The agenda outlines a range of proposals intended to reduce the cost of living while addressing the underlying drivers of rising prices. The discussion will explore the Bipartisan Affordability Agenda alongside the ideas presented in [*The Cato Institute Handbook on Affordability*](https://www.cato.org/handbook-affordability), which argues that lasting affordability comes from expanding economic freedom, removing unnecessary regulatory barriers, and increasing competition. [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).