President Donald Trump's top economic and trade adviser Larry Kudlow is "out of touch," according to former White House economist Austan Goolsbee.
Speaking to MSNBC's Katy Tur, Goolsbee explained that Trump's celebration of the GDP is unwarranted because it took such a significant dive. It's a lot like losing $100 and getting back $60, said Tur.
"You score five runs in one inning, that is a good inning, but if you let up ten runs in the inning before that you're still way down," Goolsbee explained. "I think the numbers look very much like what happened in the job market over the summer. Where we started with a 21 million job loss, and we made back a little over half of that. And then we kind of stalled out. We're still adding jobs, but you also saw this morning another epically bad new unemployment claims number. You still have well over 700,000 people filing for unemployment insurance newly this week. Now we're seeing this on the GDP side. Certainly, this is a positive. You would not want a smaller number, but it has to be bigger and more sustained than what we saw today before we can say that we're back to normal."
Tur noted that Kudlow was on MSNBC earlier with host Chuck Todd and he, and Trump, both claim that if Vice President Joe Biden is elected that the country will be plunged into an economic depression.
"Kudlow was saying if you raise taxes on everybody it will slow down the economic recovery and bring it to a halt," Tur recalled. "Is that true if you tax the wealthy in this country more? Will everything fall apart?"
"Of course not," said Goolsbee. "We can look at all of the previous times that the Republicans have cut taxes for low-income people or we can look specifically at this time when Donald Trump cut taxes by $2 trillion for the highest income people and the biggest corporations and we didn't get any magic beanstock beans. That never happened. I'm friendly with Larry Kudlow and I have known him for a long time. I think they are dangerously out of touch if we think that what we need right now in the middle of a pandemic is $30 billion more tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations. That is absolutely not what we need. We need relief to ordinary people."
See the full interview below:
