Scott Bessent Just Explained Why Your Rent Went Up — and You Can Thank Joe Biden

Bessent is also intellectually honest enough to state the full picture — something this administration deserves credit for. Deportations solve some of the demand side of the equation. They do not solve the supply side. The reason Dallas has affordable housing and Los Angeles doesn’t is not primarily immigration. It’s governance. Texas builds. California blocks. One city puts new housing units up in months. The other takes years, if it allows them at all. Just ask the Pallisades fire victims, many of whom are still trying to get the permits (i.e. Los Angeles city government permission) to rebuild.

The complete solution requires both: enforce the border and restore sanity to housing supply regulation. Deregulate land use. Reform permitting. Let the private market build what Americans need. Stop treating new apartment buildings like environmental catastrophes that require four years of review.

Democrats built the housing crisis in two ways simultaneously. They let millions of people across the border with no plan for where they’d live. And they made it impossible to build enough homes to house the American citizens already here. Then they blamed landlords. Then they passed rent control — which every economist of every political persuasion will tell you makes the problem worse by reducing supply further.

The Biden administration created the demand shock. Democratic city and state governments created the supply constraint. And now the left is outraged that Bessent named what everyone with a checking account already knows.

Where ICE goes, rents go down. It isn’t complicated. It just required someone with the nerve to say it out loud.