Americans really want their cheap stuff back

The core of the modern American dream is cheap stuff, and contrary to the president’s suggestion earlier this year, it turns out little girls do need 30 dolls. Or, at least, their families want to be able to afford them, and they don’t want the White House telling them otherwise.

The Trump administration’s line on its economic policies in the opening months of the president’s second go-round was, in essence, deal with it. Yes, tariffs will cause short-term pain, and sure, efforts to reshore manufacturing and curb immigration may increase labor-market uncertainty, but, officials insist, it will all be worth it. That’s how we got Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying that access to inexpensive goods is “not the essence of the American dream,” and President Donald Trump saying that kids should make do with fewer pencils.

The messaging isn’t landing. Sacrifice is not a fun thing for consumers to do, especially when the payoff is vague at best and, at worst, contrary to the kind of economy they desire. Prices continue to rise, “affordability” is the word of the moment, and consumers are frustrated with the lack of it everywhere they look.

“They had a theory of the case of how the economy would evolve earlier this year,” says Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Policy Institute, an economic think tank. The administration thought mass deportations would open up jobs for American workers, DOGE-driven government layoffs would push workers toward private-sector roles, and tariffs would incentivize a manufacturing boom and reshoring. Thus far, most of it hasn’t been working out. “Even nonpolitical people are aware that something’s floundering here,” Konczal says.

Trump, who rode to the White House in no small part on a promise to bring down costs, is scrambling to refocus. He’s floating haphazard policy ideas (economists are generally dubious), claiming prices are already down (somewhat true for select products, very much not true for others), and expressing exasperation at the whole situation.

Voters often blame the guy in the Oval Office for their problems, and right now, that guy is Trump. He’s learning a lesson the Biden team did: You can’t insist your way to a good economy.

As much as conservatives may not like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mandami, they are paying attention to him, especially his campaign’s relentless focus on affordability. Whether or not people agree with the democratic socialists’ solutions, the overall message resonates: The rent — and the price of everything else — is too damn high.

Americans in New York and across the country are justified in being miffed. Consumer prices have increased by 25% since 2020. While inflation appeared to be slowing around the middle of 2025, it has picked up again and is on track to end the year at about 3% annual growth. The compounding effect of years of price increases is taking a financial and psychological toll.

“It’s that cumulative piece of it,” says Claudia Sahm, the chief economist at New Century Advisors.

Gas and egg prices have come down from their highs earlier in the year, but the price of coffee, beef, and bananas are going in the other direction. Beyond the grocery store, Ernie Tedeschi, a non-resident senior fellow at the Yale Budget Lab, explains that the price of durable goods — think furniture, appliances, and electronics — increased by 1.5% over the first eight months of the year. During the same period last year, durable goods prices fell by 1%, and there was an expectation that prices for these bigger-ticket items would continue into 2025. “It’s not just that they rose at all, it’s that we were expecting a decline,” Tedeschi says. “That’s not pandemic size, but that’s a meaningful increase.” Services prices, such as entertainment and transportation, have continued to rise at an elevated pace, too.

The costs of major essentials are especially daunting for many consumers, including healthcare, childcare, and housing. The median home sales price in the US is over $400,000. Just five years ago, it was much closer to $300,000. Childcare costs families thousands of dollars each year. Healthcare costs are expected to rise steeply for many Americans next year.

“People are broadly feeling pretty negative about the economy,” says Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. They’re “perfectly aware” that inflation rates have fallen, she says, but even if goods aren’t rising in price quite as fast, consumers can still remember the old sticker price, which is aggravating. Add on the fact that because of tariffs, many people don’t think we’re out of the woods when it comes to price hikes, either.

Another factor Hsu thinks is worth noting: weakening incomes. People are worried about their job security, the labor market, and their current paychecks. Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the University of Michigan’s November survey mentioned softer incomes as a negative factor in their personal finances, compared to 20% the month before. Average wages for most workers are still outpacing inflation, but the job market is stagnant, and many workers are stuck in place.

“The most visible part of this low-hire, low-fire job market is entry level workers being like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve done 5,000 interviews and all I got is this lousy T-shirt,’ but the other, smaller violin is people who were job-hopping to get raises for the last few years who just can’t do that,” says Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. “That’s actually neither great for them nor for their employers.”

The TL;DR here is people are tired of being surprised at how expensive everything is and increasingly annoyed that their paychecks aren’t going as far, too. A Washington Post-ABC News-Pisos poll from October found that 71% of American adults say they’re spending more money on groceries compared to a year ago. Many consumers have hoped prices would fall — they don’t realize that, in many cases, the best they can hope for is for them to stop rising so much.

“As a former Biden administration official, I will tell you we learned the hard way that consumers do not distinguish between price levels and inflation,” Tedeschi says.

When people get angry, they look for someone to blame. This time around, that’s Trump: the WaPo-ABC poll found 59% think the president is at fault for the current rate of inflation. A Quinnipiac poll from October found that just 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, his lowest point since February 2017.

“I think the American people realize that’s just not a priority for this administration,” Konczal says.

Trump, who campaigned on “making America affordable again,” has struggled to counter the disillusionment. Speaking with reporters in early November, Trump touted the reduced cost of this year’s Walmart Thanksgiving basket while overlooking that the 2025 edition includes fewer items and brushing aside concerns about prices, at one point declaring, “I don’t want to hear about the affordability.” Days later, Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” said that the administration is making “substantial progress” and that prices will come down “over the coming months and next year.” In a subsequent interview with Fox News, Bessent said the administration would seek to lower coffee and banana prices “very quickly,” and at the end of the week, the president signed an executive order dropping reciprocal tariffs on food items such as beef, coffee, and avocados. The White House has also announced deals to cut the prices of weight-loss drugs.

In a post-Mamadani election scramble, Trump has floated a flurry of ideas that could be seen as addressing the cost-of-living problem. There’s the idea of sending out $2,000 checks to low- and middle-income Americans as a tariff rebate and making 50-year mortgages a thing. Many economists and real-estate analysts aren’t sold on these propositions. Congress would need to agree to send out the checks, and projected tariff revenues wouldn’t be enough to cover them. Half-century mortgages would mean homebuyers pay significantly more overall interest and take longer to build equity. It could also increase demand for homes, in turn increasing prices and adding stress to an already crunched supply if we don’t end up building more homes.

Even more Trump-friendly voices are doing some sign-tapping around affordability. Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brett Baier have pressed the president on the issue, asking him to respond to concerns — which he’s largely dismissed — about prices. In an interview with CNN, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was up front about her own experience as a consumer. “I go to the grocery store myself,” she said. “Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington, DC, at my apartment, and they’re also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia.”

In a statement to Business Insider, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said that “cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus since Day One.” He cited lower prices on gas and eggs and touted measures like a “historic drug pricing deal” on GLP-1 drugs. “The Trump administration will continue to implement and emphasize these and other economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America,” he said.

Trump, like Biden, finds himself trying to convince a highly skeptical public that the economy is better than meets the eye. Consumers may not know the exact price of everything they buy at the grocery store, but they are aware that their weekly basket is getting pricier. Some consumers are buying less and smaller in order to cut costs, or taking on credit card debt to make ends meet. To some extent, they’re taking the White House’s advice, albeit not by choice — they are buying less, they are sacrificing.

Admittedly, the price puzzle is a hard one to solve. “There’s no low-hanging fruit here, especially on something like housing,” Sahm says. Housing policy is generally dealt with at the state and local levels, and there’s not much the federal government can do. “You can look to the White House and Congress to actually go after specific price imbalances,” Sahm says, but it takes thought and effort.

The president has attacked the Federal Reserve and demanded that it lower interest rates. That could help in some areas — such as bringing down mortgage rates and lending rates, etc. But the Fed’s is a blunt instrument, not a precise one, and some of Trump’s policies may have ultimately stood in its way.

“They would’ve lowered interest rates more this year if you hadn’t unleashed tariffs,” Sahm says.

The thing about being president is that you get to take credit for the good things, but that also means people give you credit for the bad. Fairly or not, Americans have been viewing the economy as bad for a while now, and it’s up to Trump to fix it.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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