LARRY KUDLOW: Now’s the time for the GOP to message affordability

Larry Kudlow is right about the diagnosis even if the prescription needs some work. Voters keep telling pollsters the same thing: prices are too high, paychecks don't stretch, and they want someone to fix it now, not deliver a lecture on monetary policy from 1980. Republicans have the better economic argument. They just keep forgetting to say it in language a person at the grocery store actually uses.

The party's instinct is to talk about deregulation and tax brackets like that's a winning bumper sticker. It isn't. Nobody's kitchen table conversation is about marginal rates. It's about eggs, rent, and whether the car payment eats the whole paycheck. Free markets versus big government is true and important, but it's an abstraction until you connect it to why the fridge costs more to fill than it did four years ago.

What actually works, and what Kudlow is gesturing at, is specificity. Cheaper energy because you stopped strangling domestic production. Lower grocery bills because you're not drowning small producers in compliance costs. Housing that's actually buildable because local and federal red tape didn't triple the cost of a permit. That's not ideology, that's arithmetic people can check against their own bank statements.

The Democrats' answer to affordability has mostly been subsidies, price controls, and blaming greedy corporations for problems their own policies created. That's a weaker hand if Republicans actually play theirs. The opportunity is sitting right there. It just requires talking like someone who's bought groceries recently, not someone reciting a econ textbook at a podium.