NEC Director Kevin Hassett: ‘Right Now, the Economy Does Look Amazing to Me’

EXCERPT:

HASSETT: “Well, again, right now, the economy does look amazing to me. The inflation is going down. The unemployment rate is low. Initial claims, like, no one‘s getting — almost no one‘s getting fired. And final demand was up about 4 percent, which is about what my friend Howard Lutnick was predicting back then. It was the sort of surge in imports of capital goods that I think that caught people a little bit by surprise. That‘s why the number was a little bit lower. But I think that you‘re seeing really, really strong growth. And in the end, one of the things that I can say as an economist is that there‘s a big economic literature that says that in the end, people vote based on what‘s in their pockets. There‘s a guy named Ray Fair at Yale that has a famous paper that shows that that‘s — what people have in their pockets is the best indicator of what‘s going to happen to elections. And so, if you take the Ray Fair model, then you can say, well, actually, real incomes went down under President Obama. Then President Trump won, and real incomes went down under President Biden. President Trump won again. And so, I think that the real incomes growing right now are really positive sign politically, and much more positive sign than something I would see in a poll.”