While President Donald Trump pledged to begin a "golden age" on "Day One" of his presidency, in recent weeks he and his administration have started to talk about the possibility of economic pain, while at the same time not ruling out the possibility of an outright recession.
The way that the administration has framed it is that their policies will produce "short-term pain" that will in the long run be better for the economy as more domestic production returns to the United States.
Many economists who spoke with the New York Times, however, suggested that deliberately engineering an economic recession wouldn't deliver the long-term benefits that Trump has promised.
ALSO READ: 'Should be impeached!!!' Trump lashes out at judge in furious caps-heavy Truth Social rant
"The idea of short-term pain for long-term gain is not a crazy idea in and of itself," said Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who then added that Trump seems to be producing "short-term pain to get more long-term pain."
Kimberly Clausing, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Times that jacking up tariffs on all foreign goods will actually be counterproductive for the administration's stated goals of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
“If their goal is to re-industrialize, I think they’re going to learn that tariffs actually set them back on that,” she said. "Making things in America is much harder when all the inputs are more expensive."
MIT economist David Autor, who has long been critical of the consensus among economists about international trade, nonetheless said that the Trump administration's blanket tariffs would do little to rebuild manufacturing jobs, particularly because it appears to be canceling out the investments made to restore manufacturing by the Biden administration.
“It cannot be just a tariff story,” he said. “There has to be investment.”
