A growing number of Americans can no longer afford to buy new vehicles. Since 2020, roughly one million potential buyers have exited the market, and industry forecasts suggest they are unlikely to return soon, according to Wall Street Journal.
Although automakers initially expected sales to recover to pre-pandemic levels, persistent economic pressures have kept demand below earlier expectations.
Before COVID-19, U.S. new-vehicle sales typically reached around 17 million units annually. Today, most forecasts place demand closer to 16 million vehicles or less, with little chance of a full recovery in the near future. One major reason is cost: the average new vehicle now sells for nearly $50,000, and many models exceed $55,000. As entry-level options disappear, new cars have become increasingly out of reach for middle-income households.
The WSJ writes that automakers recognize that affordability has become a major obstacle. While some companies have announced plans to introduce less expensive models, substantial price reductions are not expected anytime soon. Rather than competing through discounts, manufacturers have concentrated on producing higher-margin vehicles such as pickups, SUVs, and premium trims.
The industry's approach changed during the pandemic, when supply shortages limited production but allowed companies to maintain strong profits through higher prices. That experience convinced many automakers that selling fewer vehicles can be more profitable than chasing volume through aggressive incentives. As a result, manufacturers have become more cautious about discounting and more focused on protecting profit margins.
Consumers who are priced out of the new-car market often look to used vehicles instead, but prices there have also risen significantly. Many households have responded by delaying purchases altogether and keeping their current vehicles longer. This trend has pushed the average age of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads to a record level of roughly 13 years.
At the same time, automakers face mounting expenses from tariffs, supply-chain challenges, and large investments in electric vehicle development. These costs further reduce the incentive to prioritize low-priced vehicles. Companies such as GM and Ford continue to emphasize trucks, SUVs, and other profitable models that generate stronger returns than compact economy cars.
Some manufacturers, including Stellantis, have pledged to expand their lineup of lower-cost vehicles in the coming years. Meanwhile, brands such as Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai still offer some of the market's more affordable options, although they too have increasingly shifted toward SUVs and larger vehicles.
Industry analysts increasingly believe that annual U.S. vehicle sales may remain below the pre-pandemic norm for years to come. Returning to the 17-million-unit level would likely require a much larger supply of vehicles priced under $40,000. Until that happens, many consumers will continue postponing purchases and extending the life of the vehicles they already own.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/01/2026 - 06:55Authored by Bronwyn Eyre via The Epoch Times,
In his book-cover endorsement of “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind,” author Bruce Bawer calls it “easily more important than any book in recent memory.” Elon Musk adds: “Western civilization is doomed unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken.”
They’re right. Professor Gad Saad’s newest book will jar your mindset and leave you with a degree of shock. You’ll want to tell others about it, and it will be a bestseller (in fact, it already is).
The book cover’s sketched lamb holding a sign reading “FREE THE WOLVES” delivers the book’s thesis in a nutshell—that the madness of misplaced empathy toward alien entities, cultures, and religions is suicidal. And the Western world—or at least a critical mass of its cultural and political influencers—is sold on the idea.
The book is freighted with stunning examples of lunatic policies that prioritize marginalized groups over cherished time-tested Judeo-Christian tenets, customs, and practices. In his chapter “Cultural Theory of Mind,” for instance, Saad discusses how both the British police and government declined “over several decades” to intervene in the “organized sexual exploitation of young white girls by ‘Asian’ grooming gangs across countless cities on an industrial-scale level … lest they might be accused of bigotry or, worse, Islamophobia.”
Some instances of suicidal empathy occur where you’d least suspect it. Traditionally, for example, merit and scientific aptitude have comprised the hallmark for entrance into medicine. But according to Saad, CanMEDS (which develops professional codes for physicians and surgeons in Canada) has devised a new model that “would seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise.”
He then provides a 150-word statement elaborating on CanMEDS’ 2025 renewal guidelines—ones that address “ongoing structures of racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more.”
Suicidal empathy—a Saad coinage, by the way—has become well-implanted in Canadian universities.
The University of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science recently advertised for two positions—one in AI, the second in computer science. Position one “is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as woman, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or Two-spirit” while position two “is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as a member of a racialized minority.”
Not to be outdone, the University of British Columbia recently advertised for a chair in oral cancer research. “The selection,” read the ad, “will be restricted to members of the following federally-designated groups: people with disabilities, Indigenous people, radicalized people, women, and people from minoritized gender identity groups.”
So that’s how the empathy cookie crumbles these days. Illegal immigrants are welcomed by the hundreds of thousands and often more accommodated than tax-paying citizens. Hamas terrorists are noble; Israel’s IDF “genocidal.” Squatters are prioritized over residents. Twerking drag queens entertain kindergartners during reading hour. Foreign aid is sluiced out with no strings attached. The “unhoused” occupy and despoil public parks. Free needles are handed out with little expectation they’ll be returned. Medical and fire department personnel are burned out by the coddling of street addicts.
Saad notes an academic movement that actually seeks to change the term “pedophile” to “minor-attracted people” (MAPS). In one of its papers entitled “Humanizing Pedophilia as Stigma Reduction,” the abstract begins: “The stigmatization of people with pedophilic sexual interests is a topic of growing academic and professional consideration, owing to its potential role in moderating pedophiles’ emotional well-being. Thus, reducing stigmatization toward this group is of paramount importance.”
My favourite example of suicidal empathy? That’s a tough one, but I’ll go with the government grant awarded to researchers at Concordia University to de-colonize light. On their “Decolonizing Light” website, the researchers explain that the “website explores ways and approaches to decolonize science, such as revitalizing and restoring Indigenous knowledges, and capacity building. The project aims to develop a culture of critical reflection and investigation of the relation of science and colonialism.”
It’s somewhat reassuring that the phenomenon of suicidal empathy has existed, in some form, for centuries. Saad cites two Aesop’s Fables—in one case, a kindly farmer takes a freezing viper into his warm coat pocket but is fatally bitten when the viper warms. In another, a scorpion convinces a frog to carry him across the river on his back then fatally stings the frog, because it’s in his nature to do so.
How proud one could feel if our political leaders were wise to the folly of misplaced empathy. But as Saad puts it: “Two former Canadian prime ministers, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his son Justin Trudeau, are perfect exemplars of Western political leaders who have destroyed their nation’s cultural fabric via their empathetic commitment to cultural relativism.”
That might explain why, in 2017, Justin Trudeau authorized a $10.5 million payout to Omar Khadr for Canada’s alleged complicity with the United States in the violation of Khadr’s constitutional rights at Guantanamo Bay. He had killed an American soldier in the Afghan war and spent years in that prison, but was eventually handed over to Canadian authorities.
Saad, who fled the Lebanese civil war with his Jewish parents (who had earlier been kidnapped and ill-treated by the Palestine Liberation Organization), settled in Montreal and was taken on by Concordia University in 1994 as a marketing professor. He now terms himself an “evolutionary behavioural scientist.” He recently revealed on the Joe Rogan podcast that, amid repeated death threats, he’s leaving Canada to live in the United States.
Saad told the National Post: “I love Canada, but there comes a point where the abject antipathy that you experience from Canadian society forces you to look elsewhere to a place where you might be appreciated and allowed to flourish.” He’s now a scholar at the Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
A while back, I reviewed Piers Morgan’s latest book “Woke Is Dead” and wrote that it “might go a long way toward straightening out an age—as his subtitle states—‘of total madness’ for all of us.” Perhaps more than I realized at the time, Morgan’s optimism may involve too much wishful thinking. For, alas, Saad’s ominous outlook trumps Morgan’s auspicious one. Morgan himself revealed doubts in saying, for example, that “we must keep pounding” against wokeism and “woke is dead ... but we’re not totally in the clear.”
Saad tells how, in March of 2024, he posted some thoughts on his X feed regarding the “suicidal empathy” he felt is sending the West “into a death spiral.” He received an email from the publisher of Broadside Books with a link to the post and the comment, “Here’s your book idea.”
That idea is in sync with previous thinkers and writers. Arnold Toynbee argued that societies collapse when they fail to intelligently respond to new challenges. Thomas Sowell believed that the intelligentsia often espouse policies that make them feel virtuously compassionate, while being decoupled from the negative consequences of said policies. James Burnham, in his “Suicide of the West“ (1964), wrote that “suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.”
So Saad is in good company in holding that the “West’s elitist progressive political class is infected by a mind parasite that causes its empathy module to misfire in every conceivable manner. Many of the policy decisions that are wreaking havoc in the West stem from this poor calibration of empathy, resulting in a society that is galloping toward the abyss of infinite lunacy.”
Hon. Bronwyn Eyre, LLB, is a Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and Saskatchewan’s former Minister of Justice, Attorney General, and Minister of Energy.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/01/2026 - 06:30Via Headline USA,
The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 11 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released this week.
Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it’s long been considered the leading cause of preventable death.
The preliminary findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were based on survey responses from more than 24,200 adults. In the survey, CDC officials defined current cigarette smoking as smoking at least 100 cigarettes in a lifetime and now smoking every day or some days.
In the mid-1960s, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans, public education campaigns and changes in the social acceptability of lighting up in public.
In 2024, the percentage of current adult smokers fell below 10% for the first time. Last year, it was 9%, according to the new survey.
The use of electronic cigarettes has been inching up among adults, but has held about steady in 2025, at about 7%.
“The continued decline in smoking is a monumental public health achievement that has saved millions of lives and billions in healthcare costs,” said Yolonda Richardson, president and chief executive of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy and research organization.
Richardson said current smoking-prevention efforts have been set back by cuts President Donald Trump’s administration made that eliminated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health and its “Tips from Former Smokers” advertising campaign.
She cited estimates that the “Tips” campaign alone helped more than 1 million Americans quit smoking and saved over $7.3 billion in healthcare costs.
“This critical work must be restored and sustained to continue reducing smoking-related disease, death and healthcare costs nationwide,” Richardson said.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/01/2026 - 05:45