Op eds

Cost of living is coming down, but Congress can do more

Jan 26 2026

This op-ed by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) first appeared in The Advocate on January 23, 2026. 

It’s a new year, but many Louisianians are still missing the old prices that they were paying before President Joe Biden took office.

The Biden administration’s bad policies drove up prices by 21% in just four years. In turn, the average Louisiana household had to spend an additional $28,426 to cover the cost of inflation over the course of Biden’s four years in office.

It’s a mess, but Republicans in Washington have already begun to clean it up.

We started by peeling back excessive regulations that raise the price of goods and services. President Biden added more regulations than any president in history, and it cost American businesses roughly $2 trillion to comply with this red tape.

President Donald Trump vowed to cut ten regulations for every new rule he put in place. By March, he had already eliminated $1.3 trillion worth of bad Biden-era rules. Congress joined the fight by permanently invalidating some of the worst Biden administration rules through the Congressional Review Act. President Trump signed two of my regulatory repeals into law to save consumers money on their energy prices and bank fees.

These regulatory repeals have already unleashed a flurry of investment in Louisiana. The Interior Department, for example, recently announced that it had raised $279 million from oil and gas leases after scaling back President Biden’s offshore drilling ban. These offshore lease sales not only generate revenue to reinvest in America, but they also help drive down gas prices to below $3 per gallon from record-high prices.

In addition to cutting regulations, Republicans in Washington passed the One Big Beautiful Bill. This legislation secured our border, doubled the child tax credit and eliminated taxes on tips and overtime. By extending the 2017 tax cuts, we saved Louisianians from an average tax increase of $1,214 per family.

Inflation is now down to 2.7% per year from upward of 9% under President Biden. That doesn’t mean, however, that the low prices from President Trump’s first term will come back. Lower inflation only means that prices are not growing as quickly. If we want to bring the cost of living within reach for more Louisiana families, we must increase incomes.

Fortunately, real wages have already begun to climb under President Trump. In fact, wages for blue-collar workers increased faster in the first half of this year than they have in any time in recent history. Add in the fact that America’s GDP grew at a staggering 4.3%, and Louisianians have a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the high-paying jobs on the horizon.

We’re off to a great start, but Congress still has a lot of work to do to keep wages growing and return a sense of normalcy to the pocketbooks of Louisianians. We need to address our broken health care system, bolster our immigration policies, reform our burdensome regulatory state and address the soaring price of housing.

To do any of this, though, we need 60 votes in the Senate. You don’t have to be a senior at Caltech to know that most of my Democratic colleagues hate President Trump. They’ll never cast a vote to help the Republican agenda, and that’s their right.

The only way around the 60-vote requirement is to use the 1974 Congressional Budget Act’s reconciliation process. This procedure allows us to pass legislation with 51 votes — just like we did with the One Big Beautiful Bill.

We still have two opportunities to use reconciliation to pass legislation with a simple majority. That’s why I have been hounding Senate leadership to put reconciliation to use to address the cost of living in America, with or without our Democratic friends.

Prices may not soon return to where they were before President Biden destroyed the cost of living in America, but the right policies can ensure that Louisianians have the income they need to breathe easy in this new year.