America’s Optimism Problem

A guest post from Congressional Build America Caucus Chair Rep. Josh Harder

[Photo by Richard Baker/Getty Images]

This piece is a guest contribution and does not necessarily reflect the views of Inclusive Abundance.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Trump described a booming economy, plummeting prices, and an America in better shape than ever. I wish he were right. The reality is just the opposite – Americans are so cynical about the future that the only thing we actually agree on is that something fundamental isn’t working. Prices are way too high. Our government is broken. Corruption and chaos dominate the headlines. And what’s worse is there’s a deep cynicism that things will never change, with barely one-fifth of Americans expressing trust in government.

This optimism problem we’re facing didn’t come out of nowhere – its roots lie in the very material scarcity families are facing in an increasingly unaffordable America.

This loss of hope reinforces itself. When people stop believing improvement is possible, they stop investing in change. Why take risks if the system is rigged? Cynicism rewards short-term thinking and punishes long-term effort. It makes outrage more rational than cooperation and destruction more satisfying than reform. In this environment, the loudest voices win, and when enough people stop believing in improvement, progress doesn’t just slow, it becomes politically impossible.

Sustained progress and economic growth are not automatic. They depend on millions of people believing tomorrow will be better than today. For most of human history, growth was rare and temporary. What made modern America different wasn’t just technology, it was the widespread belief that improvement was a normal fact of life. That belief is what brought my great-great grandparents to California’s Central Valley in the first place, and like all parents it’s what drives my wife Pam and me as we raise our family. This hope shaped how we invested, educated, and governed. It created a self-reinforcing cycle of optimism and construction. Today, that assumption no longer feels like a given.

Nowhere is that loss of confidence more visible than in the debate over affordability. The median age of a first-time home buyer is now over 40 years old. Electricity bills in my district alone have doubled in the last decade. As the dad of two hungry toddlers who eat their weight in blueberries, I have to take deep breaths before looking at our grocery bill, despite the President’s State of the Union claims about dropping fruit prices. The good news is these problems are fundamentally problems of supply, which means they’re solvable. The challenge is they require patience, sustained effort, and political courage.

Politicians across the country are promising price controls to freeze the rent and stop electricity price hikes. Voters are desperate for relief and skeptical that anything else will give them some much-needed breathing room. I’ve supported legislation to make sure monopoly utilities justify rate increases and can’t abuse their market power. But even well-intentioned regulatory fixes are often band-aids.

If we don’t expand supply, we just redistribute scarcity.

At the root of the affordability crisis is something basic: we haven’t built enough.
Not enough homes.
Not enough power generation.
Not enough transmission lines.
Not enough innovation.
Not enough infrastructure to keep up with a growing country.

Now, for the first time in years, there’s a bipartisan movement to make it easier to build. Congress is passing serious housing reform and negotiating real changes to how energy projects are approved. We’re actually working across the aisle to ensure energy projects succeed or fail on their merits, not on political vendettas.

But more than any one piece of legislation, we need to build a new politics of hope, ambition, and growth. That’s why I launched the bipartisan Build America Caucus last year, which now includes over 40 members of Congress. We don’t agree on everything, but we share a basic belief: America still works when we build. In a country and especially the 119th Congress that feels so divisive and divided these days, these opportunities for hopeful growth are critical for breaking us out of the cycle we find ourselves in.

Cynicism doesn’t disappear because politicians give better speeches or even pass new legislation. It disappears when things actually improve, and that’s what’s been missing in recent years. If we can actually make progress on lowering costs, we can create a virtuous cycle where further investment leads to better public services. Cities like Austin and Jacksonville have shown something important: when you build enough, prices stabilize. When prices stabilize, frustration falls. And when frustration falls, politics becomes less zero-sum. Improvement compounds when people believe it will continue.

For 250 years, Americans assumed their kids would be better off than themselves. That assumption built universities, highways, suburbs, research labs, and an entire middle class. If we want to lower costs, we don’t just need better programs. The fastest way to restore trust is to build something real.