NEC Director Kevin Hassett said the US economy is "booming" and defended the Trump Administration's handling of the economy despite voter concerns over inflation.
If this is truly a PR problem, then when is gas going to be $3 again? When will inflation settle down to 2%?
Well, you know, I think that what's going on is the American people look at what's in their wallets and then they react accordingly. And so Americans right now are acting the way they've done in past booms. And uh ahead of an election cycle, the fact that there's, you know, possibly partisan uh pollsters telling us that the people are really, really depressed. It's a classic Democrat move and I just don't buy it because if it were true, if the polls were of any value for thinking about what's going on with consumers, then we should look at the consumption data and say, geez, yeah, that's right. People people aren't spending. But in fact, the retailers are doing well. I talk to the banks all the time, they say that their consumers are happy and they're paying back their loans. And so, and so the data, the hard data are radically inconsistent with the polls. And and so which do you believe? The the government hard data or the polls that have been wrong about every single election since I can remember.
But the government hard data is that only 29,000 jobs were created in the
Oh, come on. That's just last month. So so the previous
And it was revised down. It was revised downwards by 60,000.
It was revised downwards a month before to 133,000, which was still above the forecast, double the forecast of the Fed and above the forecast of everybody forecasted by who forecasted for Bloomberg. And and so we had a blockbuster number the month before and then we had a number this month that was actually much better once you took out the decline in government jobs. So the decline in government jobs is part of our structure to be more fiscally responsible where we've reduced federal employment by about 300,000 workers.
So two years ago, President Trump said he thought he could get mortgage rates down to 3% or even lower. Last week, mortgage rates had the biggest weekly jump in four years. It's more than 7%. Why has President Trump failed to deliver on that promise?
Uh President Trump hasn't failed to deliver uh at all. The the economy is booming. And what you have to do is you have to look at the whole picture. And so what happens when the economy is booming is that uh people feel better about their economic circumstances and then they go out and they spend and they buy houses and they buy cars. And if you look at the housing data over the summer, then income growth is is outpacing uh the the mortgage rates and housing uh starts and purchases and permits are are way up. And and and so once again, uh you know, absolutely true, mortgage rates have to come down uh and as we get inflation down to 1, 2%, then that's where mortgage rates are going to head towards, you know, that plus two or three. Uh and uh that's going to happen, I think very quickly over the next few months. Uh but the bottom line is that that in the end, you look at the hard data, people are buying houses.
Well, I I mean, you said it was basically the fault of partisan polling, but it was President Trump himself who said that people didn't think the economy was good, they were just wrong. They needed to have a, there needed to be a better PR campaign.
I I can talk to you about the partisan polling because I've done a lot of work on it. Do you want to hear something about it? I mean, like so in the Michigan survey, uh, the Republicans who were surveyed say the economy's great. Uh, Democrats who were surveyed say the economy is like the worst since the Great Depression and the independents agree with the Democrats, but if you look at the ups and downs of the independents and uh Democrats, it looks like what the Michigan Survey guys call independence are actually Democrats. And so I think that it's a two-thirds poll of Democrats and so it's saying that people are really unhappy, but I just think it's a bad poll. But again, if people were unhappy, it'd show up in the data.
It seems to be showing up in the data, just not the data you're looking at. Kevin, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Yeah, it is. But not just not the polls.
