The pump does not argue. Neither does the receipt at the end of the grocery aisle. Americans are paying more for less, and the hour asks why.
Tonight, Jonathan Alexandre, Vice President of Governmental Affairs and Senior Counsel at Liberty Counsel, sits in the nation’s capital with Paul Teller, president of Teller Strategies and founding executive director of Advancing American Freedom, and Marty Dannenfelser, Vice President for Government Relations and Coalitions at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Teller came up through the Republican Study Committee, served as chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz, and did conservative outreach in the Trump White House and the office of Vice President Pence. Dannenfelser has spent four decades on Capitol Hill and inside the Department of Energy. The hour is about affordability—and the hurdles standing between a household and a lower price.
The pain has more than one source, and the guests do not hide them. A war with an ideological regime in Tehran has put a hand on the Strait of Hormuz. Debt from the Covid spending binge is still being paid. A bloated federal government and the habits of the Green New Deal have turned ordinary costs into a policy problem. Alexandre draws the line the hour will not cross. Democratic socialists answer a strained economy with more intrusion. A populist right has begun to reach for the same tools. The conservative answer is the older one: local government, fewer rules, and room for ingenuity to use what the country already has.
On the table is a booklet from Advancing American Freedom: 101 conservative solutions to make life cheaper. It is online at AdvancingAmericanFreedom.com. Teller holds the printed copy so the viewer can see it. Regulation alone, the hour reports, adds about $131,000 to the cost of a home—forms, climate rules, and middlemen standing between a family and the first rung of wealth. A barrel of oil has again cleared $100. Under Obama it stayed there for the better part of a year. Under Biden, 83 days. In the first Trump term, not one. Permitting reform is dull to say and decisive to do. A decade can pass before capital already raised brings oil, gas, or minerals out of the ground. California writes rules for trucks, ports, and energy moving through the state. New York can block a federally approved pipeline that Pennsylvania and New England need. The dormant Commerce Clause is named for what it was meant to prevent: one state vetoing the commerce of its neighbors.
Work is handled as a blessing, not a penalty. Teller argues that a benefit with no expectation of work, training, or self-improvement does not only cost the taxpayer. It removes a person from the only engine the country has. Private work. Private spending. Private revenue. Dannenfelser points to the welfare-reform model—block grants instead of open-ended entitlements, fewer “mother, may I” permissions, overlapping job-training programs combined so a state closest to the problem can spend the money it sent to Washington. Federalism, Alexandre says, is not a feeding tube into a national behemoth. Data centers belong in the same argument. The people who have to live beside the fence still have to decide whether the jobs and the revenue are worth the draw on the wires.
The war is not set aside as someone else’s subject. Tankers, the guests report, are moving again at something like 80 percent of capacity, and oil prices have begun to ease. That should reach the pump if it holds. It should not be mistaken for a change of mind in Tehran. Dannenfelser wants the objectives kept plain: no nuclear weapon, an end to the funding of terrorism, and the strait open. He would go further—a closer partnership with Israel, pressure toward regime change carried by Kurds and Iranians themselves, not by an American occupation. October 7. Hezbollah. The Houthis. Teller calls it one octopus. Chopping the head is not a war on the Iranian people, who are already suffering under the regime. It is the condition of a peace that lasts.
The Senate is where good ideas go to wait. The House has passed measures that would protect household ratepayers when utilities build for data centers, the Ratepayer Protection Act among them, and a permitting-reform deal has been negotiated to the edge and pulled back for more concessions on wind and solar. Democrats have refused the votes. Alexandre’s summary is blunt. The solutions on the table are hurdles removed, not programs added. The left either does not see that or will not hand the other side a win in an election year.
Advancing American Freedom flips the slogan. The cry in the campaign is demand—for energy, groceries, housing. The booklet answers that the ingenuity is already here. Government is standing on the supply. Pennsylvania fracks and booms along a border where New York has banned the same geology. The climate program, traced from Obama through Biden, treated a higher price at the pump as a feature. Expensive gasoline was supposed to force the car, the stove, and the dryer into a different life. Innovation keeps ruining the forecast. Fracking and horizontal drilling made the United States the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, and still a pipeline to the next state over can be stopped.
Tariffs get the argument they deserve, not a slogan. Teller calls them what they are designed to be: a device to raise the price, or else pointless. Targeted and temporary measures against an adversary such as China can be defended. What manufacturers cannot plan around is a rate that changes by the week—on the food, on the metal in the can, on the parts a new American factory still has to buy from overseas. Housing materials are in that basket. A soybean crop that cannot move is in it too. Dannenfelser reports the other side of the ledger without pretending it settles the case: a large steel plant announced for southeastern Iowa, and a South Korean energy investment aimed at Alaska and Texas, offered as proof that production inside the country escapes the tariff. Short-term pain is not long-term gain unless the rules a builder will face in two years are knowable.
Scripture is not an afterthought. Matthew 25 is the picture of an economy: five talents doubled, two talents doubled, one talent buried out of fear of the master’s character. Casting bread on the water is the same instruction—use what was given, for the household nearest you and for the people beyond it. Government can regulate a people out of their own competence. It cannot supply the agency. That still belongs to those made in the image of God, in a country where an idea can still be taken to market.
The choice left standing is not theoretical. Permits that take a decade. A state veto on a neighbor’s pipeline. A welfare check with no path back to work. A tariff that moves faster than a planting season. A strait held by a regime that does not think in price signals. Pastors, parents, and citizens will have to decide which hurdles they intend to remove, and what they will do with the room that returns. That is tonight on CURE America.
