‘What’s the Reality?’ Fox Anchor Pushes Trump Economic Advisor on $2,000 Checks to Americans

Kevin Hassett, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, joined Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on The Story Monday to discuss the possible reopening of the government and the $2000 rebate checks President Donald Trump recently promised.

MacCallum began by asking if the administration is concerned about “a negative Q4 because of all this?”

“Well, first, to follow up on what you were just talking about, I had a long conversation with Secretary Duffy, and I can say that there’s no better transportation secretary in my memory for getting this thing back up and running. And so now that the government looks like it’s going to open, you know, we really are grateful for the senators with the cooler heads who are willing to help us do that. Then I have high confidence that by the Thanksgiving weekend, Secretary Duffy is going to be able to get it almost back to normal,” replied Hassett, adding:

And so right now, I think our Council of Economic Advisers’ estimate of how much harm there is to GDP is it’s probably going to cost us one to one and a half percentage points of the fourth quarter. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to get a negative quarter. I think if we had two or three more weeks, especially if it ran into Thanksgiving, we probably would have had a negative quarter. And remember, Martha, as you and I have talked about for years, if you get two negative quarters in a row, that’s the R-word. And so it’s really great that we’ve dodged this bullet.

“All right. Well, that is good news. In terms of the president rolling out this idea, and we’ve talked about this over the last several months, of whether or not affordability questions could be alleviated to some extent by individual rebates for low and middle-income individuals. The president now looks like he’s leaning towards a dividend of $2,000 per person that would be paid to everyone. What do you think of that plan?” MacCallum followed up.

“Well, when we were passing the big, beautiful bill, one of the questions was, what should we do with the tariff revenue? And one of the things that I think people believed in the summer was that the best use is to reduce the deficit, reduce the debt. And it’s really been working. So right now, we’ve reduced the deficit by almost $400 billion this year,” Hassett replied, adding:

But one of those surprises since last summer is that, although it’s not a surprise to Art Laffer, is that since we passed the tax cuts, we’ve actually had a big increase, almost $200 billion in tax revenue. We thought that it wouldn’t be a big reduction like the CBO said, but we’ve actually had a big increase. And so I think that it’s back on the table to think about what to do with those tariff revenues. And I’m sure that, you know, the president will discuss with congressional leaders whether, because of all the extra tax revenue, there isn’t more room to get checks back to people.

“So when people hear that, what’s the reality of it? When do you think that people would get these $2,000 checks in the mail from the White House, from this plan?” MacCallum pressed.

“Well, again, it will have to be passed by Congress, but the reality is just this: that because of Biden’s inflation, which averaged five percent over four years, people on average lost about thirty-four hundred dollars in purchasing power. Yeah, and they’ve gained about twelve hundred this year, but there’s still room to go. And so we’re making up ground fast. But the fact is that people are still down about two thousand dollars relative to what their purchasing power was when Joe Biden took office. And so we understand that people feel like there’s an affordability problem, but we’re closing the gap fast. And with these policies and potentially, you know, rebate checks, we might close the whole gap really, really fast,” Hassett added.

“Okay, really fast, but you won’t say exactly when, whether that’s Q1 next year?” MacCallum asked.

“It’s Congress, not me,” Hassett replied.

“Not yet, okay,” MacCallum noted, before moving on.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.