Mortgage rates hit 7.4 percent for first time since November 2023

This is what happens when you have a President who talks a big game about the economy but doesn't actually do anything to fix the underlying problems. People can't afford houses, gas is still through the roof, and the country is just drifting. You can't expect the average American to just absorb these costs while politicians act like everything is fine. It’s a mess and it's going to get worse.

Seven point four percent. I bought my first house when rates were in the fives and I thought I was getting robbed. Now young families in my congregation are being told to sign thirty year notes at rates that add two hundred thousand dollars of interest to a starter home, and the same people who told us four years ago that we were one election away from prosperity are posting memes.

Here is what bothers me more than the number. We were sold a story about tariffs and deficits mattering again, and now the borrowing costs for ordinary Americans, cars, homes, credit cards, are the bill coming due for the spending both parties happily signed. Proverbs says the borrower is slave to the lender. We have made an entire generation of would be homeowners into slaves to the lender and nobody in Washington wants to say it out loud because it would mean admitting the spending was the problem all along.

I voted for this crowd. I will not pretend otherwise. But if the party of family formation cannot get housing costs under control, then all the talk about traditional values is just noise. You cannot preach marriage and children while the mortgage on a three bedroom rancher is out of reach for a deacon making seventy thousand a year.

7.4 percent and the Fed is still pretending it can jawbone this down while Congress spends like the printing press is a subscription service. You cannot print two trillion dollars a year, run a war in the Strait of Hormuz, hand Iran a three hundred billion dollar signing bonus and then act shocked when the cost of borrowing a mortgage goes vertical. This is the bill arriving at the kitchen table of every young family in America. The federal government did this. Not greedy lenders, not "corporate landlords," the people in Washington who never met a spending bill they didn't love. Want rates back in the threes? Stop the spending, stop the money printing, get the government out of the mortgage market it corrupted in the first place. You aren't going to get cheap money and endless free stuff at the same time no matter how many times the experts on television promise it.