Tariffs, Housing, and the Moral Cost of Self-Interest

This week’s economic news has landed with a thud—one that echoes through markets, media outlets, and our own household. With President Trump’s sweeping tariffs on all imports now in effect, the stock market has already shed over $6 trillion in value. Financial analysts warn of a looming recession, rising consumer prices, and slowed growth. But in our home, there’s a strange and uncomfortable tension: as devastating as these economic policies may be for the country at large, they might actually work to our personal benefit.

My fiancée and I are looking to buy our first place together. Like many others, we’ve been watching the housing market with a mixture of hope and apprehension. Prices remain high, and interest rates—though off their peak—are still steep enough to be daunting. But now, as this new round of tariffs sends ripples through the economy, we’re finding ourselves in the morally ambiguous position of quietly rooting for a downturn.

It’s not that we want people to suffer. We don’t. But if the economy slows, housing prices may dip. If inflation stalls and the Federal Reserve responds with rate cuts, our mortgage terms might improve dramatically. Unlike so many Americans who face job insecurity during recessions, we’re both employed in the public sector—local government jobs that, for better or worse, tend to offer stability during turbulent times. That stability positions us to weather the fiscal storm that these tariffs may trigger.

And that’s the moral crux of our current dilemma. These tariffs are, by nearly every credible account, bad policy. They raise costs on consumers, disrupt global supply chains, and threaten long-term economic health. The justification—protecting American industry—is a seductive nationalist talking point, but the reality is far messier. The medicine may be worse than the disease. And yet here we are, quietly hoping that it works just badly enough to push housing into a more affordable range and interest rates into friendlier territory.

There’s something corrosive about this line of thinking. It exposes a deeper problem at the heart of how economic policy plays out in real lives. Tariffs, like most blunt instruments of governance, create winners and losers. But what happens when you find yourself, almost by accident, positioned to benefit from a policy that could harm so many others?

This moment has reminded us of how thin the line can be between economic optimism and opportunism. We want a home. We want to build a life together. But we also want to live in a healthy, fair, and thriving society. The fact that those desires are, in this moment, at odds with each other says something troubling about the way our system is structured—and about the unintended consequences that cascade from morally questionable policy decisions.

So we wait. We save. We hope, somewhat guiltily. And we reflect on what it means to be good citizens in a time when the rules of the game seem increasingly designed to pit personal gain against collective well-being. In the end, maybe the true cost of tariffs won’t just be economic—it may be moral.