Dir. Kevin Hassett; If I Get into Why the Economy Is Great, ‘Then It Looks Like I‘m Insensitive’

RUSH EXCERPT:
HASSETT: "No, no. First of all, I just want to say that this is a characterization that very often the president‘s opponents make when I‘m doing interviews, because it‘s a double bind question. If I say, oh, people are wrong, the economy is great, then it looks like I‘m insensitive. And if I then go into why the economy is great, then it looks like I‘m insensitive. And so let‘s just unpack it and start with, well, people are saying that the economy is not great. Well, it‘s true that the polls which have gotten the president‘s success wrong every time, have been saying that people are looking a little bit depressed about the economy. But if you look at their actions, the actions speak louder than words. And so what we know from the economic literature is that if people are worried about whether they‘re going to lose their job, if they‘re worried about whether they‘re going to get a pay cut, then they start reducing their consumption and increasing their savings. It‘s called the buffer stock theory of savings. And so what we see right now is, is that people are really, really optimistic about the future, about their future incomes because they‘re spending really, really at record levels. They‘re defaulting at their credit card debt at really, really low levels. We just had this week, the consumer, the consumer information data came out or price data came out that showed that consumption was up year over year at the highest rate in years. We‘ve got GDP now for the third quarter running 4 to 5%. and so think about all the things that are positive, like initial claims for unemployment. It‘s the lowest almost all the way back to world war two, when we had a much smaller labor force. And so people are acting like what the initial claims say, they‘re saying, oh, I‘m confident. I‘m not going to lose my job. I‘m confident in my income growth because GDP growth is coming to and the polls are different from that. And so then the question is, are the people wrong or the pollsters wrong? And I would say the pollsters are wrong."