- Donald Trump won the 2024 election, in large part, on a promise to bring down consumers’ cost of living. But with the president now waging a high-stakes tariff campaign, his Treasury secretary tells Americans cheap goods are “not the essence of the American Dream.”
President Donald Trump’s vision to “make America great again” hinges on many quality-of-life improvements. From building “the safest and wealthiest and healthiest and most vital communities anywhere in the world” to recreating the golden age of infrastructure development, Trump’s pitch to Congress and the media aims to revive a particular vision of the American Dream.
But there's one element of that dream that is deliberately missing, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: Cheap stuff.
“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” Bessent said at a recent meeting of the Economic Club of New York.
Instead of said “stuff,” Bessent says the dream is focused on mobility and self-actualization. “The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security,” he said, adding, “for too long, the designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this.”
Bessent went on to criticize the current trade regime, in which “the United States provided a source of massive demand, acted as arbiter of global peace, but did not receive adequate compensation.”
Bessent’s speech is just one of many recent missives from the administration appearing to U-turn on a campaign promise to lower the cost of living while repositioning Trump’s “America First” agenda in broader terms. On Friday, Bessent told CNBC "there’s going to be a detox period" as government spending is drastically cut. And on Sunday, President Trump told Fox News his policies would create "a period of transition," refusing to rule out a recession. And last month, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission chair vowed to ‘‘combat inflation by making sure wages stay up,” a statement that contradicts classical economic theory.
The vision is a stark reversal of decades of policy under both Republicans and Democrats, which held that cheaper goods were a major component of the good life. A famous chart from the free-market American Enterprise Institute holds that once-luxury goods—including cars, TVs, and furniture—have become widely accessible thanks to liberalized trade policies. Indeed, the sharp jump in the cost of living during the pandemic years has been credited with propelling Trump back into the White House.
But now, faced with the prospect of high prices surging even further on tariffs while the government spending that propped up the U.S. economy in the last recession fades, markets and consumers are reeling. The S&P 500 shed 2.7% Monday while the Nasdaq lost 4%. Consumers, meanwhile, are cutting back spending at the fastest pace in four years. It remains to be seen whether tariffs coupled with domestic deregulation can achieve the second part of Bessent’s vision of upward mobility and economic empowerment. Carmaker Honda recently announced it was moving production to the U.S. from Mexico to avoid tariffs, but younger generations are still downbeat on their ability to achieve a secure economic future. A recent calculation from financial site Investopedia found achieving the basics of the American Dream—owning a home, saving for a secure retirement, and sending two children to college—now costs a whopping $4.4 million. That’s more than 20 times the net worth of the typical American family, according to Federal Reserve data.
