Cheap Stuff Is a Huge Part of the American Dream

More: Auto tariffs, to the tune of 25 percent, go into effect Thursday. Tomorrow, President Donald Trump will announce more tariffs in an address in the Rose Garden; he terms these “reciprocal” since they’ll purportedly be based on how much those countries tax our goods when they enter.

“I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American-made cars,” Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday in response to fears of price increases on cars. “We may have, short term, a little pain,” said the president when he imposed the 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico. “People understand that. But long term, the United States has been ripped off by virtually every country in the world,” said Trump, citing trade deficits as the problem.

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a speech to the Economic Club of New York last month. The administration keeps hitting the same notes: Prices will go up, and you’ll like it, dammit. Or at least: Prices will go up, and it’s for a good reason.

It’s easy to decry cheap goods, or stuff. Stuff conjures up images of pointless consumption, materialism with no purpose, in service of nothing good, throwaway crap from Shein and Temu and Amazon. But that’s not what it really is, right? Stuff is important for a good life: The vitamins I take to stay healthy and the kettlebell that transforms my home into a gym so I can work out without securing child care. It’s the extra plates I bought to throw a huge dinner party over the summer. It’s the swaddles I got for my son when he was a baby so he could sleep soundly. It’s the phone I use to call my parents, since they live 2,000 miles away.

People express what they value through their stuff. Stuff is not the essence of the American dream, or the thing that makes life worthwhile, or what we’ll be thinking of on our deathbeds, but it is an elemental building block that allows us to pursue all the other things that do give us meaning: That dinner party you hosted at which you were able to fete a friend or get to know a neighbor really did need plates. 

This isn’t a coastal elite value. The ability to take our stuff for granted, because it’s long been so cheap and easy to access, binds together Americans of all classes and creeds. It’s not the whole American dream, but it sure is a big part of it. Not because the stuff is inherently valuable, but because it allows us the ability to do all the other things we seek—some of which is noble, some of which is pointless. We Americans are blessed to have mostly moved up Maslow’s hierarchy; our basic needs have mostly been met. Now we can use stuff to reach a higher plane.

But there’s also stuff that will be hit by Trump’s tariffs that isn’t really discretionary at all, that isn’t a nice-to-have, but rather a need-to-have.

The pharmaceutical industry, for example, has long been protected from tariffs by a World Trade Organization agreement that Trump will ostensibly start violating (as he has previewed pharma tariffs that will come later this week). ”Patients will end up paying for these products,” said Richard Saynor, CEO of Europe’s largest generic drug maker, referring to the tariffs. “Either supply will get worse and/or the pricing will get back to insurers and ultimately to patients. I don’t think this is a strategy to drive more investment to the U.S.”

Does medicine count as stuff? What about food? What about building materials for houses? Because these things will all be made more expensive by Trump’s tariffs too.

Rich people can bear this burden much better than the poor and middle class can. Trump and Bessent should refrain from insulting the many Americans who want their stuff to remain affordable, who believe that this truly is a piece of the American dream—something that allows us to have our material needs not just met, but exceeded.

More on tariffs here:

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Scenes from New York: “An official in charge of helping people start cannabis businesses in New York City resigned abruptly last week as her agency was investigating an accusation that she tried to pressure another woman into a polyamorous relationship in exchange for a city contract,” reports The New York Times. (Now that’s just greedy.)

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QUICK HITS

• The Trump administration accidentally deported a Maryland father from El Salvador with protected legal status. Now they claim they can’t get him back.

NEW: In a court filing this evening, the Trump administration said that it had mistakenly deported a Maryland father to a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error.” pic.twitter.com/e5cOcR1W0W

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) April 1, 2025

The evidence that he is an MS-13 member is disturbingly…light. Here’s more.

The court documents do not say he is a convicted gang member. I read them. Furthermore, that allegation purportedly stems from *this* incident. Is this all the “proof” we desire? Some dude at Home Depot (also being questioned) saying he’s a gang member? Is THIS the standard? https://t.co/5XmLa3Cbwf pic.twitter.com/ywnexR6TGO

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) April 1, 2025

What evidence did the government have against him? Here’s the paper trail I can find. Is there something I’m missing? pic.twitter.com/cElWgMsirF

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) April 1, 2025

• A 2020 study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences purported to show that black infants had better medical outcomes when cared for by black doctors vs. white ones. “Spontaneous bias” could be a factor, the study authors wrote at the time. This study has already been discredited due to all kinds of issues. For example, the authors did not control for birth weight, even though they knew they ought to. A subsequent replication effort that controlled for this found that the white doctor/black doctor discrepancy was in fact not there if you do control for the lowest birthweight/most medically complex cases. But new info has come out, courtesy of Freedom of Information Act requests, that makes clear that the researchers knew about these issues with their study and deliberately excluded complicating evidence, saying in an earlier draft that they’d “rather not focus on this” as it “undermines the narrative” if we’re “telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants.” That’s right: It was all about narrative, not about actually finding the truth. Disturbing.

Notable reporting from Emily Kopp. A study purported to show that mortality is higher for black infants seen by white doctors. By now, the issues with this study are widely known.

FOIAed notes show how the authors in fact cut points that they said “undermined the narrative.” pic.twitter.com/RtVe7inKcH

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) March 31, 2025

• “[Wisconsin] voters on Tuesday will decide whether to tip the balance of the state’s highest court to conservatives, away from the left-leaning judges who currently hold a majority,” reports Bloomberg. Elon Musk is fired up about this race, pouring a ton of money into it.

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/04/01/cheap-stuff-is-a-huge-part-of-the-american-dream/