CNN’s Jake Tapper Grills Top Trump Advisor on Economic Double Talk: ‘How Do You Square’ it?

CNN anchor Jake Tapper grilled National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett about how Americans could be “living in the greatest economy” while simultaneously acknowledging that President Donald Trump’s administration still has “a lot of work to do.”

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Tapper confronted Hassett about the weaker-than-expected jobs numbers in July.

“The economy, according to BLS, lost 23,000 jobs in July, when economists were expecting a 95,000-job gain,” Tapper said. “The job creation you boasted about for the previous two months, unfortunately, those numbers were also sharply revised down. It turns out 100,000 jobs were not created in May and June. You said in June that this was — quote — ‘the strongest job market in your lifetime.’ By what metric?”

“The bottom line is that, if you look at the overall economy, then things are really, really booming,” Hassett said. “As an example, there are 83,000 construction workers building factories right now. That’s a number that we have never seen before. Initial claims for unemployment insurance are the lowest they have been since World War II.”

Hassett went on to claim a “reduction in government workers” and hospitality workers filing for unemployment after the World Cup made the numbers seem softer than they actually are. But Tapper countered by arguing July’s numbers were not an outlier, but rather the norm.

“There have been job losses for six out of the 18 full months of President Trump’s second term,” Tapper said. “That’s a third of them. And the Trump administration has only added 548,000 net jobs so far, which is considered very slow growth. It’s growth, but very slow. Two million jobs were created in the last 18 months of Biden’s presidency. Are you really arguing that your numbers are better than that?”

“Well, I disagree with your number,” Hassett said. “We will have to follow up on e-mail, but I just looked at the latest number. It was that job creation under President Trump since January 20 is about 880,000 jobs.

“But we won’t argue about 800 or 500 factually on a show right now. But the fact is that the thing that really jumps out at us is that those are really good jobs. They’re manufacturing jobs. They’re construction jobs. The number of manufacturing jobs under Joe Biden dropped by 230,000. And the reason that matters is, the intuition that candidates of both parties understand that these blue-collar jobs in construction and manufacturing, they’re really high-paying jobs. And so the typical construction or manufacturing worker of the U.S. has seen an increase under President Trump of $3,000 or $4,000 to salary.
And under Joe Biden, it was about negative that. And it dropped about $3,000. And the reason is that manufacturing was collapsing, and so the high-paying jobs were going away. And so I think that we will take our record over his every day.”

Later in the interview, Hassett acknowledged some shortcomings of the Trump economy.

“Grocery prices way too high,” Hassett said. “It started out with we basically printed money and helicopter-dropped it into the U.S. and created a 20 percent inflation in the past. I go to the grocery store, I do the shopping, and I keep an eye on prices every week, and there’s stuff like the price of beef that’s still really, really high and very problematic for people. The thing is that you mentioned the one-month number, that if you aggregate over the Trump term, then, again, the typical overall worker is making $1,000 more after adjusting for inflation, and $3,000 or $4,000 more if they’re in a blue-collar job.
And so those people have more money for groceries, but grocery prices are still high, and we have still got a lot of work to do.”

Tapper promptly called out that admission.

“How do you square you saying just now, ‘we still have a lot of work to do,’ with you saying that ‘we are living in the greatest economy’ in your lifetime?” Tapper asked.

Hassett mostly dodged the question — instead offering a broad defense of the economy.

“Well, OK, so people are losing their jobs at the lowest level since World War II,” Hassett said. “Losing your job is a really bad thing to have to happen to somebody. And the labor force is way bigger than it was back then, so that’s a remarkable piece of data. Keynes argued that the business cycle is being driven by investment fluctuations. We have got capital investment in the U.S. about the highest I have ever seen. And so we have got all the cyclical things that we normally look at saying that this is an economy that’s in liftoff stage.

“And so, yes, I stand by it. I think the other thing is, with AI, we have got lots of estimates that say that productivity growth is around 2, 2.5 percent right now, which is sort of — sort of core growth rate you should have in a typical year going forward, even before you spend money on new machines and new workers.”

Watch above, via CNN.

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