Every price is an honest cost plus three tolls. The receipt starts at today's real American numbers. Run the country for twelve years under six doctrines and see which one takes the tolls off.
| Median new home sold | $424,900 · Census/HUD, May 2026 |
| Nonsupervisory hourly wage | $32.38 · BLS, June 2026 |
| Real hourly earnings, year over year | −0.8% · BLS, May 2026 |
| Beef steak, retail | $12.80/lb, up 16% · BLS, May 2026 |
| Regulation's share of a new home | 26.4% = $131,734 · NAHB, June 2026 |
| Big Four packers' share of beef | 85%, up from 36% in 1980 · USDA / DOJ |
| Rancher's cut of the retail beef dollar | under 30¢ · Farm Action |
| US cattle herd | smallest since 1951 |
| Tariffs in force | lumber 35.2%, steel 50% |
The starting prices and the wage are real. The split of each price into honest cost and three tolls is an argument, not a measurement, though every component is sourced: the scarcity toll on housing leans on NAHB's own regulatory-cost study, and the monopoly toll on beef leans on USDA concentration data and the open DOJ investigation. The twelve-year projections are a model built to make the argument legible. They are not a forecast, and you should not cite them as one.
Status Quo is calibrated so that real wages fall about 0.8% a year. That is not pessimism. That is the number BLS published for May 2026.
Single-file prototype. Starting numbers real and sourced; twelve-year projections are a model of an argument, not a forecast.