'Just nonsense': Economist dismantles core Trump claim

President Donald Trump repeatedly claims that he inherited a troubled, dysfunctional economy from his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, and quickly turned it around. In fact, the United States enjoyed record-low unemployment during Biden's presidency, but widespread frustration over inflation helped Trump pull off a narrow victory of roughly 1.5 percent on Election Night 2024.

Economist Justin Wolfers, who teaches at the University of Michigan but is originally from Sydney, Australia, tore apart Trump's claims about the economy — from tariffs to the stock market — during a Saturday, November 29 appearance on MS NOW's "The Weekend."

Trump claimed that his tariffs will bring in so much revenue that the U.S. will be able to "almost completely" eliminate federal income tax.

But Wolfers told "The Weekend" hosts Eugene Daniels, Jackie Alemany and Jonathan Capehart, "This is just nonsense. Let me start with one important fact-check. The president appears not to understand the difference between millions, billions, and trillions. That's actually one of the most important points in all of economics; they're massively different. We are not taking in trillions of dollars in tariff revenue."

Wolfers added, "If we were, we could afford his $2000 tariff checks. We aren't. So therefore, we can't."

The University of Michigan economist also pushed back against Trump's claims about the stock market, which, he stressed, is performing better in other countries than it is in the United States.

Wolfers told Daniels, Alemany and Capehart, "The other thing that he talks about a lot is the stock market. Now, here's a funny thing: If you look at the stock market returns from, say, 25 of the biggest countries around the world, the United States ranks around about 22nd right now. So yes, American stocks are up. But guess what? They're up even more everywhere else."

U.S. consumers, according to Wolfers, are pessimistic — not optimistic — about the state of the economy.

Wolfers told Daniels, Alemany and Capehart, "So, consumer confidence right now — it's quite striking just how bad it is. So, consumer confidence right now is very close to being an all-time low. And this has been measured back to the 1970s. So consumers say that they're feeling worse than they were during the Great Recession, than they were during the pandemic, than they were during the early '80s recession. It's really quite striking numbers. If you dig into that a little bit, you ask them things like: What do you think about the quality of us economic policy?"

The economist continued, "The number of people who think that the quality of economic policy is poor is at an all-time high. It's roughly three-fifths of the American people. What you have, I think, is that the president has fundamentally lost the battle of ideas. What you normally do with an economic program is you come up with some ideas, and you try and convince people of the virtues of them. And he has fundamentally failed. There's a deep question as to how long people are going to keep spending."

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