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.Â
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 h
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