Since 2000, average hourly wages in America have risen 132 percent. Overall inflation over the same period clocked in at 92 percent. That means real hourly earnings — what your paycheck actually buys — are nearly 20 percent higher than they were 25 years ago.

So why does everything feel so expensive?

Because the sectors where costs have gone completely haywire are the same ones where government has been most aggressively "helping." American Enterprise Institute economist Mark J. Perry has been tracking this pattern for years in what he calls the "Chart of the Century," updated through December 2025. The numbers are brutal.

Hospital services: up 281 percent since 2000. College tuition: up 196 percent. Childcare: 158 percent. Other medical services: 147 percent. Housing: 111 percent. Every single one of those categories is drowning in federal subsidies, regulations, mandates, and licensing requirements. As AMAC Newsline reported this week, the exposed nerve of the American affordability crisis runs directly through the industries Washington has spent two decades "fixing."

Take healthcare. Employer-sponsored family coverage premiums went from $13,770 in 2010 to $26,993 in 2025, according to KFF's benchmark survey. That's nearly double in fifteen years — a stretch that includes the full rollout of Obamacare, which was supposed to make coverage more affordable. The Affordable Care Act. Right there in the name.

College tuition tells the same story. Washington flooded the system with subsidized loans and grants, and schools responded by jacking prices to absorb every available dollar. It took President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill — which applied market pressure instead of subsidy bloat — to get colleges slashing tuition costs for the first time in decades, in some cases by tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Meanwhile, the sectors government mostly left alone? Televisions are down 98 percent since 2000. Toys and computer software dropped roughly 75 percent. New cars went up just 25 percent — well below overall inflation. Household furnishings, 21 percent. Almost like free markets work when you let them.

But the new wave of Democratic Socialists doesn't want to hear about data. They want grocery stores.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — the self-described socialist who waltzed into Gracie Mansion promising to fight for "the people" — is planning five city-run grocery stores offering 30 percent discounts on staples, targeting an end-of-2027 opening. The concept isn't new. A nonprofit grocery store in Kansas City tried the same model. Cost $17 million to build. Closed in August 2025.

That's the pattern. Government-backed competitors burn through taxpayer money, undercut private grocers who actually have to balance a ledger, then collapse when the math catches up. The private stores they displaced don't magically reopen.

The left's counter-argument is that markets have "failed" in these sectors and that more public intervention is the only answer. Which is an interesting theory to hold when the data shows costs exploding precisely where intervention is heaviest and dropping where it's lightest. That's not a market failure. That's a government fingerprint.

A Cato Institute survey conducted with Morning Consult last month found that 52 percent of Americans still view capitalism favorably compared to just 37 percent for socialism. But among Gen Z, those numbers flip — 53 percent favor socialism, only 45 percent favor capitalism, and 38 percent view communism favorably. That generational gap matters because it explains where the Mamdanis and the DSA candidates draw their energy. A generation raised on subsidized tuition promises and $27,000 health premiums has decided the system is broken. They're half right. They just can't identify which part of the system broke it.

Perry's chart doesn't require a political decoder ring. The lines go up where Washington intervenes. The lines go down where it doesn't. Twenty-six years of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, not theory, not ideology — just prices.

The affordability crisis is real. The socialist prescription is to do more of what caused it.