But beneath the chaos and the antics, MAGA economics are built on a powerful, enduring story: America’s working class—the people who build, drill, and weld, Americans who clock in, get their hands dirty, and wear uniforms at work—have been shafted by globalization and an elitist system of trade that is hastening their doom. It is an emotionally gripping narrative built on a sliver of truth and vast helpings of myth. It ignores the three H’s: home prices, healthcare costs, and higher-education expenses.
The myth has the upper hand, driving Trump’s tariffs and threatening to rekindle inflation and needlessly crash the economy. The first-order effect of the myth is straightforward: higher prices on everyday products. Whether tariffs are 10 percent or higher, costs borne by U.S. importers will be passed on to customers. Everything from diapers to T-shirts to cars and washing machines will get more expensive, and those increased costs land more heavily on everyday wage earners, since they spend more of their earnings on goods such as these than the wealthy, who spend more on luxuries like vacations and Pilates classes.
Then there is the ill-defined term working class. It is the focus of Trump’s trade policy, but who belongs to America’s working class? Manufacturing workers, who make up only 8 percent of the U.S. workforce? Or does it also include the vastly larger group of not-wealthy workers, from cashiers and nursing assistants to truckers, baristas, and schoolteachers, whose jobs are not connected to trade—or may even benefit from it? Tariffs are a bad deal for them.
With the exception of industries vital for national security, such as shipbuilding and semiconductors, upending the American economy for the purpose of landing more factories doesn’t make sense, not when there are persistent labor shortages in manufacturing: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 449,000 unfilled jobs as of March. MAGA nostalgia for the blue-collar glory days of the 1950s overlooks the fact that those factory jobs were dangerous, dirty, and monotonous. They are not as hazardous today, but twenty-first-century Americans aren’t interested in a life on the factory floor.
According to a Cato Institute survey, 80 percent of Americans believe it would be good if more Americans worked in factories, but only 25 percent say they would be better off in a factory job. As Dave Chappelle said in 2017, "I want to wear Nikes—I don’t want to make them."
The lack of enthusiasm for factory work is understandable, especially when many workers have more appealing alternatives. Consider other hands-on blue-collar jobs. Employers are offering some high-school students $70,000 a year to work in trades after they graduate. Plumbers, electricians, and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) specialists have jobs that can’t be shipped overseas and might even be immune to artificial intelligence, with salaries that can grow to six figures over time. Plumbers who start as apprentices often become plumbing-company owners. Entrepreneur is a career trajectory that doesn’t exist for hourly factory workers.
There is a grim tale told about the American economy over the past several generations: It has all been downhill for the working class, the middle class is vanishing, and American wages have been relentlessly punished by a heartless system of global trade that runs on Chinese workers toiling in near-slave-like conditions.
The statistics tell a different story. The median wages of American workers climbed 29 percent from 1979 to 2024, adjusted for inflation. (This period encompasses the latest era of globalization, which accelerated in the early 1990s.) While the share of U.S. households considered middle-income ($35,000 to $100,000) has notably declined—from 55 percent in 1967 to 38 percent in 2023—that is largely because of movement toward the top of the household income chart, according to economist Mark J. Perry. In 1967, only 13 percent of households were considered high-income ($100,000 or more). By 2023, the share had more than tripled to 41 percent.
In the aggregate, this presents an encouraging picture of American capitalism and its promise of upward mobility. But it glosses over developments that have punished the life prospects of working-class (or not-wealthy) Americans. And that is where the story of decline told by the president rings true.
Listen to two of the most articulate supporters of President Trump’s trade and economic agenda: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Here is Ungar-Sargon in Newsweek: "And then there’s the cost of a middle-class life. While working-class wages are up, the hallmarks of a middle-class life—a home, adequate healthcare, an education, a retirement—have risen astronomically."
Yes, all that is true. Absolutely.
And here is Bessent at the Economic Club of New York in March: "If American families aren’t able to afford a home, don’t believe that their children will do better than they are [doing], the American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles from China, it is more than that."
Spot on.
What you don’t hear from Bessent or Ungar-Sargon is that these missing building blocks of prosperity—affordable housing, healthcare, and higher education—have nothing to do with trade or globalization. The three H’s are home-brewed, made-in-America, dysfunctional impediments to the American dream.
Over the past 40 years, home prices and healthcare costs have risen at around twice the rate of inflation, and higher education has become prohibitively expensive for most families.
The accumulated costs of the three H’s can’t be measured just in dollars and cents. They are dream killers, catalysts of disappointment and cynicism about the American project for someone who works hard and can never afford a house, faces bankruptcy over medical bills, or gets crushed by debt for an overpriced degree that is useless in the job market.
These daunting obstacles to economic well-being are homegrown and not a byproduct of globalization. They can’t be fixed with the MAGA recipe of trade wars and mass deportations. Progressives aren’t confronting this reality either and, in fact, decades of liberal policies and priorities—from mountains of regulations and permitting requirements that stifle homebuilding to legions of nanny-state administrators at universities—add to the bill for housing and higher ed.
The good news is this: Problems that are made in America can be fixed in America, too. In their book Abundance, the influential liberal writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson cite the damage done to the housing market by the rulemaking and regulatory obsessions of progressive lawyers and bureaucrats. They also offer practical ideas that encourage building rather than stifling it.
Healthcare costs continue to grow as America’s health-insurance colossus staggers on. It has proven immune to serious repair. But the best of the MAHA movement offers something else: a frontal attack on the garbage in the American diet—ultra-processed foods—that contribute to obesity and jack up the bill for the treatment of chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease.
Trust in higher education is plummeting as tuition and other expenses keep climbing. That opens alternatives, ranging from a no-frills revival of classical learning and capturing the teaching benefits of large language models (LLMs) to careers based on apprenticeships that bypass college and employers dropping degree requirements for a wide scope of jobs.
America has a remarkably dynamic and adaptable economy. We don’t need to whine about other countries supposedly screwing us over and treating us badly. A true America First agenda should start with squarely facing our homegrown failures.
