Check this out, and I can prove that it is wrong:
- A payment of $2665 corresponds to a house that costs $465,000, so that is realistic.
- The 22% marginal rate isn’t applied to all of your income, it’s applied only to the portion of your taxable income that is over $81,050 for a married couple.
- In order to qualify for this house, the payment can’t be more than 50% of pretax household income. To afford this house, a couple would need to make $5330 per month, which means they would have to make $64,000 per year combined.
- Median household income in the US is $83,730. So an “average” couple would have no trouble affording an “average” house.
However, crying about how people making minimum wage can’t afford an average house ignores mathematical definitions. Average is more than minimum, and there is no way to change that.
This is leftists online trying to piss people off because most people don’t understand math well enough to know that this entire social media post is bullshit.
3 Comments
Andrew · January 12, 2026 at 10:42 am
On one hand, yes.
But on the other hand.
A 3 bedroom ranch with a single car garage and 1 bathroom near me went up for sale.
340,000.
That was a starter home in years passed.
It was built in 1962.
You could not build one of them today (here), and the pool of ranch starter homes diminishes every year because people increase their size or finish the basement or both, or bulldoze the house for the lot.
I know this because my best friend wished to build basically a 3 bedroom ranch but with a 2 car garage and the City said “no it’s not big enough”.
He found one nearby lacking a garage through friend of a friend.
Since 2020 homes have appreciated in price by about 50% in most cases.
This means, both he and I (another 3 bedroom ranch) would likely be unable to purchase, today, what we got into several years before.
420K doesn’t get much bigger than a 3 bedroom ranch.
Not far from my house, a ranch went up for sale probably 2017.
Split off the extra land and now there’s 2 more houses.
(one of these lots is what my best friend hoped to build on)
Both 2 story and both (new) are appraised around 500K, now.
(one 490 one 510)
Back when built both were 300-ish, “way back” in 2017.
Home valuation inflation is unsustainable and either will correct, or be corrected when nobody can buy them.
Divemedic · January 12, 2026 at 11:45 am
It’s supply and demand. The price is what people will pay, period. If people don’t pay it, then that isn’t the price.
AuricTech · January 13, 2026 at 12:37 am
Did Michael Mann draw this graph? I certainly see what appears to be some resemblance to a hockey stick. The timing is interesting. It matches rather closely the start and end times of a 4-year event that began in January 2021 and ended in January 2025. It appears that housing prices have trended slightly down since January 2025.
I well know that correlation does not equal causation. However, given that there appears to be little, if any, correlation between the political climate in Washington and housing prices prior to January 2021, the matter does merit study.
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