Employer-sponsored family health insurance premiums went from $13,770 in 2010 to $26,993 in 2025, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's benchmark survey. That's nearly double in fifteen years — a stretch during which we were told the Affordable Care Act would make everything, well, affordable.
Meanwhile, television prices dropped 98 percent over the same period. Nobody passed the Affordable Television Act.
American Enterprise Institute economist Mark J. Perry has been tracking this pattern in what he calls the "Chart of the Century," and the picture it paints should end every argument about whether we need more government intervention in the economy. As AMAC Newsline detailed this week, average hourly wages have risen 132 percent since 2000, handily outpacing overall inflation at 92 percent. Real hourly earnings sit roughly 20 percent higher than they were twenty-five years ago.
So workers are earning more. Prices overall are manageable. Where's the crisis?
It's concentrated in exactly the sectors where government has spent decades "helping." Hospital services are up 281 percent since 2000. College tuition has climbed 196 percent. Childcare costs have risen 158 percent. Medical services broadly are up 147 percent, and housing sits at 111 percent. Every single category where Americans feel the squeeze hardest is a category where federal subsidies, state mandates, or regulatory barriers have been piled high for generations.
The sectors government mostly left alone tell a different story. Toys and software have dropped approximately 75 percent. Household furnishings are up a modest 21 percent. New cars — subject to safety and emissions mandates but still sold in a competitive market — are up just 25 percent over a quarter century. The pattern isn't subtle. It's a neon sign: competition lowers prices, government involvement raises them.
Sarah Katherine Sisk, a Hillsdale College alumna now pursuing a master's in economics at George Mason University, laid out the argument in AMAC Newsline with the kind of clarity that makes the socialist pitch sound like what it is — a plan to fix a leak by turning up the water pressure.
But the Democratic Socialists have an answer for everything, and their answer is always more government. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to open five city-run grocery stores selling staples at 30 percent below market prices, with the first location targeted by the end of 2027. The idea is that government-subsidized groceries will bring down costs for working families.
Kansas City tried something similar. Spent $17 million on a nonprofit grocery store designed to serve an underserved community. It closed in August 2025. The money vanished. The neighborhood still needs groceries.
Stanford researchers studied what happened when San Francisco expanded rent control — another beloved progressive intervention designed to make housing affordable. The result: available rental supply dropped 15 percent. Citywide rents actually rose 5.1 percent. Landlords pulled units off the market, converted them to condos, or let them deteriorate. The policy designed to help renters made renting harder and more expensive for everyone who didn't already have a controlled unit.
This is the pattern. Subsidize tuition, tuition skyrockets because schools know the money's guaranteed. Mandate insurance coverage, premiums double because insurers face captive customers and regulatory moats. Control rents, supply evaporates. Open a government grocery store, it bleeds cash and closes. The heavy hand of government doesn't just fail to fix the incentive structure — it inverts it.
President Trump's approach through the One Big Beautiful Bill, which caps aggregate federal student debt, at least acknowledges the supply-side problem. Stop guaranteeing unlimited money to universities and they might have to compete on price like everyone else.
The socialist left looks at the same data and concludes we haven't gone far enough. Polling shows 52 percent of Americans still view capitalism favorably versus 37 percent for socialism, but among Gen Z, the numbers flip — 53 percent view socialism favorably, 45 percent favor capitalism, and 38 percent have a favorable view of communism.
Which means a generation raised on $26,993 insurance premiums and $196-percent tuition hikes — policies created by government intervention — has concluded that the solution is more government intervention.
Every sector where competition drives the market, prices fall. Every sector where government manages the market, prices climb. The chart doesn't require interpretation. It requires acknowledgment.