The topmost issue in next year’s elections will be the affordability of, well, pretty much everything these days.

Housing has gotten the bulk of the attention in this area until recently, but after the showdown in Washington over the budget, health care has taken over as the top issue in the minds of many. When we take a closer look, we see that not only are those not the only areas where prices are rising, but that neither party has really done — or proposed — much to actually address the problems.

When it comes to housing, Democrats in Augusta say they have been spending the past several years addressing the issue — but all they’ve done is move around paper without solving the problem. They’ve made it easier for people to build multiunit housing by removing local restrictions, but they’ve simultaneously been increasing regulations and costs on landlords.

In Portland, progressives have imposed rent controls. Apart from these two supposed solutions working against one another (people won’t want to build more if it’s not profitable to do so) neither one really addresses root causes; instead, they’re patchwork non-solutions.

We see the same thing with rising health care costs at the federal level. The recent fight over whether or how to extend the subsidies for health insurance costs missed the real issue: the fact that the subsidies existed at all. Theoretically, they were first enacted as a temporary measure during the pandemic, but the necessity of them showed that the Affordable Care Act was not really living up to its name. 

Simply giving people money to help them pay for health insurance doesn’t help reduce the cost of health care. It’s easy to pin the blame on insurance companies, but it’s long past time to really consider how to make health care more affordable. If we don’t do that, all we’ll be able to do is more patchwork fixes to help pay for health insurance — and that only helps the insurance companies.

In Washington, neither party has real ideas on how to actually address these fundamental issues, so they end up simply playing the political blame game with one another instead. That might help them win elections, but it doesn’t help the American people at all, either in the long run or the short run.

Health care and housing are not the only areas where costs are on the rise, either.

Maine has high electricity costs as well, and Augusta hasn’t been doing anything to address this problem. The cost of electricity drives the cost of nearly everything we do, of course, and Maine’s keep skyrocketing. We’ve seen some of the highest growth in rates nationwide over the past decade.

As with insurance companies, politicians in both parties are often more than ready to blame Central Maine Power and other utilities, but they’re not entirely in charge of their rates. The state has the power to approve or reject their rate increase requests, and it recently rejected one, but the state also hasn’t spent nearly as much as it could have on storm mitigation and grid modernization.

We could have undertaken a comprehensive modernization program years ago, making the grid more resilient, but we neglected it. Now, CMP and other utilities are forced to take a patchwork approach, resulting in constant rate increases.

It’s not only electricity, either. All over Maine, water prices have been on the rise. This is often thanks to a need for modern upgrades and maintenance, areas that haven’t been kept up to snuff in recent years.

Sure, various pieces of federal legislation in recent years have sent some money toward spending on infrastructure, but each time they’ve been a single shot in the arm, not a brand-new, comprehensive approach. America needs to fundamentally rethink how it funds infrastructure projects, and in some fundamental ways — not grandiose ones that lead to a lot of ribbon-cutting.

Unfortunately, neither party seems especially interested in solving problems these days. Whether it’s in a federal or a state legislative race, candidates with real proposals to get things done have the potential to appeal to voters across party lines. They have to stop the finger-pointing, though, set aside some of their ideological objections, and sit down to find solutions. That’s the kind of politician we need representing us in 2026: problem-solvers who want to get things done, regardless of whether they’ve been around a while or they’re a fresh face.