Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Economic Numbers Don’t Add Up

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

Bill Kristol and Catherine Rampell talk the real state of the economy, new polling on how voters think Trump is handling it, and why Vance is suddenly diverging from Trump on key economic points.

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Must be 19 plus, available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor for your charge. Hi, Bill Crystal from the bulwark here, joined about my colleague, Catherine Rampel, to discuss the economy and Trump's economy and Trump's political economy and all that. Catherine joined the bulwark just, seems like a little over a month ago, an invaluable edition and author of a very newsletter you need to subscribe to if you don't called, what's it called, the receipts, receipts, receipts, yep.

I had various witty names for that newsletter that were rejected. I'm just going to find out. Oh, tell me. I want to know. Well, maybe off the air is more appropriate. And I don't know, you know, the bucks, the bucks stop here. Wouldn't that? That would have been good, right? Okay.

Yeah. Maybe receipts is good. Anyway, people can sign up for it and should sign up for it at the World Work website. So your last newsletter actually is very interesting. Let's just begin with that for a minute. You discussed it with Andrew Riker yesterday, I think, but on economic data in the age of Trump, say a word about that. Sure. So there's been a lot of attention paid to the fact that we're in kind of a data blackout right now because the government was shut down for six weeks.

a bunch of releases that were supposed to come out, didn't come out, a bunch of data that was supposed to be collected, wasn't collected. So those releases will never come out. So like we'll never have the unemployment report for October or the inflation report for October. And I think the general assumption has been, well, at least this was like a one-time thing. And now that the government has reopened, we'll be back on track. And that's not, that's sort of right. It is the case that, like, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is back in business, but there's a more widespread threat to the availability of government statistics on the economy and otherwise. And that's because the Trump administration has been purging statisticians, defunding statistical agencies, and otherwise censoring and manipulating lots of data. So in some cases, they're like canceling data releases altogether.

There's an annual hunger report that assesses how many Americans are having difficulty struggling to get adequate food. That's been collected for, I don't know, 30 years or something like that. They canceled that altogether. They fired the entire team that calculates the poverty guidelines, which, you know, and most people, like, wouldn't pay any attention to this, but these are the guidelines that help assess who is eligible for food stamps, Medicaid, lots of other benefits. And then there are a lot of other efforts to, again, either defund agencies, purge the people who would be collecting the data or canceling the reports altogether on climate change, immigration, crime, lots of things that, again, people may take

for granted in normal times, but do help us make sense of our world. They help businesses decide where to open up a new retail store, what to stock, who to hide. Who to hide. What prices to charge? They help workers figure out what's a reasonable raise. Things like that. They help doctors figure out what's wrong with you if you show up with mysterious symptoms. There's a, you know, regular infectious disease data, things like that that are just not being collected anymore. And then a lot of other things that, you know, besides like day-to-day practicality are basically just erasing the existence of undesirable groups from our records. So that's what it's about. I've been tracking it basically since the beginning of this administration, and I will continue to track it. And I have like a ginormous thread on blue sky, among other places, of all of the different examples that I'm coming across. If people come across other things that I should be paying attention to, please feel free to reach out because I'm trying to aggregate as much as I can. Now, what it's worth following, I know our colleague Jonathan

code on the public health side. I mean, that really is important. I mean, business stuff is important, but businesses also collect data and put out studies and some of the, you know, so one can probably, don't you think some of that can be made up for, so to speak, by the private sector, which has a huge interest in knowing what it's, I mean, if every major corporation reports on sale, for example, I had a friend who used to follow, who was an economist, I mean, and he always liked to follow, I don't know, various, not exotic, but kind of individual corporate reports, especially Walmart types of

the world, but also big business, you know, car sales. And that's put, presumably, you know, you can sort of get a sense of it. Where's the public else stuff? I feel like that's, that's, no one else really can do that. I mean, you know, and sort of, that's very bad. Anyway, but it's all bad. Yeah, no, no, it's all bad. And it's true that there are a lot of private sector, you know, proprietary data sets. And look, I look at those all the time in normal times, even when there isn't a threat to government statistics. I will say government statistical agencies in the U.S. have kind of been the gold standard. And in many cases, they are used to benchmark the private sector data collection. So, for example, there's this annual survey that gets done by the Census Bureau

that is used to sort of calibrate and wait lots of private sector data collection because they're not sure how representative it is, right? And they're relying on the infrastructure of government to help them fill that out. So there are in many times, many cases, these things are complementary. even when it seems like, oh, well, the private sector should be able to step in. And again, private sector serves a very valuable function, but they can't do everything. And things like public health, yeah, that's very difficult. There are some state-level governments that are trying to step in and not just on data collection, but on guidance.

Let's say there's another pandemic, heaven forbid, that they'll try to provide some guidance because people don't really trust the CDC anymore to provide, you know, I don't know, useful or reliable information all the time. So, again, there are some efforts here, but I think it's really a loss. And you also have the risk of if you have a void, if you have a data vacuum, if you will, it makes it easier for demagogues and authoritarians if they so choose to fill, those voids with whatever numbers they, they would like. And this administration has done that, right? You've seen the Trump administration site Walmart's Thanksgiving dinner bundle as evidence that

prices are falling. And Walmart, because it's Walmart and it's trying to tell customers it's got a great deal on sale right now, they're not incentivized necessarily to, to like provide data on on prices that is necessarily apples to apples or turkeys to turkeys or if you will. And they didn't. They said prices have fallen, but that's because, like, there's less food in the bundle. And the administration also cited DoorDash data of all things because DoorDash says that getting your breakfast foods delivered has gotten cheaper year over year. Again, of course they're going to tell you that it's a great deal and you should buy

more breakfast foods via DoorDash. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good indicator. cater for the health of the overall economy. Oh, that's very well said. So what is the, let's just talk a minute about the real, let's say the real economy. So, I mean, let's leave aside Trump. I mean, he's like, you know, he's always just making things up, basically. And talking, talking to the economy out, I guess, has been his theory.

And it's been his theory of salesmanship for decades. So, but Scott Besson, I think said this morning that inflation is down under, under Trump, which I don't believe is purically exactly correct. But, I mean, where are we? 10 months into Trump, but leaving aside almost causality, but obviously things don't change on time just because Trump becomes president, that they would claim their policies haven't gotten into effect or some have. But just really in the economy, in terms of inflation, unemployment,

the kind of core factors, how are we doing? So as I mentioned, we have a little bit of a gap in the official numbers right now because there was this shutdown, but we can look at how the economy was doing at least as of September. And those numbers suggest that unemployment ticked up a little bit. We still have, you know, better than expected job growth. So it's not like the job market is imploding. But there does seem to be some weakness there.

It seems like, among other things, businesses just don't have as many openings as they had had. So if you find yourself out of a job, if you get laid off, if you quit, if you move, et cetera, it might be harder to find a new job. So there's just, like, not as much dynamism. And there are different ways to interpret that. You know, it could just be uncertainty because of tariffs, because of other things, global uncertainty, geopolitical issues that make it make businesses a little more tentative about hiring than they had been. Who knows?

But, you know, the job market, like, hasn't imploded. It just seems a little more fragile. On inflation, you know, we have not had the huge burst of inflation. that I think many of us feared relating to the tariffs, but it has been ticking up. And I think there, again, there are different ways to interpret why that might be happening. When I've talked with businesses around the country, including those that import a lot of goods, many of them have said that because tariffs have started and stopped and been delayed and paused and all of that kind of stuff, it's made it harder for them to plan,

but it also means that they're maybe not at the phase where they really need to be passing along huge price increases to customers because the stuff that they're buying, maybe it hasn't been tariff yet. Maybe there's been a pause. Or a lot of them seem to be expecting that the Supreme Court will strike down the emergency tariffs that Trump has put in place. That's most of his tariff agenda to date is about these national emergency tariffs. So while importers have been paying the tariff money, a lot of them are expecting to get that back. And so they don't want to tick off customers in the meantime by raising their prices a whole lot to offset their increased costs as they normally would do because they're like, well, maybe this is temporary. Maybe we're going to

get the money back. And so I think a lot of businesses are just like really stretching themselves right now and profit margins are squeezed and all of that. But consumers may not be feeling it as much. Now, Supreme Court rules differently than expected like all hell could very close. I don't know. But in the meantime, yeah, I mean, prices are going up. somewhat more than they had been, but it's not, like, hugely expensive. Now, none of that is going to be of any comfort to normal Americans who are struggling with affordability. Like, they thought prices were already too high because we got a whole bunch of inflation in the years since the pandemic. And the administration, again, is not really helping things. They

didn't cause that. You know, Trump, in many ways Trump inherited a very strong economy, but he also inherited a lot of resentment about the economy because there had been so much price growth to date. But the things that they're doing are not particularly helping. And I think you see that like a tacit acknowledgement of that when you see this administration, for example, saying, okay, we're going to pare back the coffee tariffs or beef tariffs or cocoa or bananas and things like that. And it's like, that's a great idea. I don't know why you put the tariffs on in the first place, but sure, that would be welcome. Do you agree with the two things I've read, and that seemed plausible to, that anecdotally seem

kind of plausible to me, one that it's harder for young entrance into the job market now than it has been for quite a while. Does the data suggest that? And do you agree with that? And secondly, that insofar as the economy has been kept at a decent rate, though slowing maybe a bit by consumer spending, basically, that it's disproportionately spending by the wealthy or reasonably wealthy, that there's more of a gap than there may be that the working, you know, working people and people with fewer means are cutting back more. And so there's kind of a little more

of a two-tiered economy than there was just a year or two ago. Yeah, I've heard lots of different nicknames for this. There's the K-shaped economy, the idea that like the top part of the the K and the bottom part. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Yeah, they're all these cutsy little terms work. I was actually just looking at the data on younger workers. And it is true that, for recent college grads, their unemployment rates have ticked up. They're still not super high, but they're higher than they were. It's like, I don't know, 5% or so. Again, we're getting this information with a lag. So if things massively deteriorated in the last month or so, we wouldn't know. But it's still, it is harder for recent college grads. And young people in general,

so if you include people who didn't go to college, the, so like people 22 to 27, I think was the series that I was looking at. Those people do have higher unemployment. I mean, it's always higher for younger people, but it's getting worse. And again, there's some uncertainty about why that is. Is it just like companies are holding off in general? Is it about AI potentially displacing some of those entry-level jobs, particularly in white-collar professions?

We don't really know yet. but it's concerning. And if you are, even if it's, you know, a relatively small share, generally speaking of the overall population of younger people, if you are among those people, you know, it does, that's no comfort, right? It's, it's difficult for you to find a job. There don't, as I mentioned, there don't seem to be a lot of job openings right now. And you want that sort of churn in the economy, you want that dynamism in the economy to create new positions for are people just graduating into the labor market. And since we don't really know where things are headed, we don't know how much policy is going to change. We can talk about the potential AI bubble

if you want. But there are a lot of big risks out there that I think understandably make people nervous if they're still pounding the pavement or they're worried about potentially losing their current job. I mean, let me ask about that. It seems to me, again, as a hot economist, I mean, that in a way, we've had the reconciliation bill, which if you are one of Trump's economic advisors or maybe just more generally, I kind of believe that top marginal rates are extremely important to the economy and so forth, that that's, but that's happened. I mean, that's presumably priced in and that we're keeping the rates that we had where there's no tax increase and some tax reductions, I guess, in terms of expensing and stuff for business. So, but that's

probably, I say, presumably that's kind of, that's what it happened and it's priced in. I feel like the things that are coming up, what would they be? There'll be questions about terrorists, questions about Fed policy, certainly, and about Fed chairmanship. That's got to be a fairly big one coming up. The possible AI stock market bubble. I mean, I don't know. Those seem like they have more downside risk than upside potential.

Maybe I'm wrong that, you know, if you're betting on the next year, it seems like there's more chance of negative surprises, or maybe not. Maybe we're just a very strong economy, and we chug along and all will be well. I mean, that's certainly happening. Well, again, when Trump took office, he inherited generally pretty strong fundamentals in the economy. The economy, the job market was very strong. Inflation was still elevated, but trending down. We've kind of lost some of that progress, in part because of terrorists and other things, too, like coffee prices and beef prices have gotten much more expensive, partly because of tariffs, but also partly because of droughts and other things, well beyond the president's control.

I would say in addition to those risks you mentioned, there's also the risk of another shutdown. The CR goes only through January 30th. It's not really clear what's changed between now and a couple of weeks ago when the government was still shut down in terms of where the parties are. Is there going to be another renewed fight over the ACA tax credits? Is there going to be a fight over something else? with Marjorie Taylor Green stepping down and some other special elections coming up. I think where are they, Tennessee, Texas, and New Jersey.

I think it's a long shot that Democrats capture all of those. I think they already hold New Jersey. They'd have to hold on, they'd have to keep that. The other two, it's a long shot, but you never know. Either way, that margin that Republicans have in the House gets slimmer. If Democrats get all of those, then they have zero vote margin, all of which means that the stakes become higher in these negotiations, like maybe Democrats will be more emboldened and Republicans just can't afford to lose any

votes. So there's still a big political risk, which will in turn affect the economy. But yeah, the other things that you mentioned, I think, are more top of mind. When you want to bed on sports, played on a field or ice or courts. is the place Over under money lines Same game Paul AIDS gets all fine You put a smile on your face

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Or someone close to you Please contact Connects Ontario At 1-866-531-2600 To speak to an advisor Free of charge Me anyway What about the Fed? I mean how

Will Powell's term as chairman and not on the Fed board, but as chairman, I think, and swear in the spring sometime. Yeah. Trump will replace him, assuming the set of confirms this, you know, with someone more in accord with Trump's wishes. And Trump has always been, being a real estate guy, maybe a low interest rate guy and all that.

And he certainly has been as president, both in the first term and now. I don't know. I mean, is that, maybe that's good, incidentally, for the markets. So, you know, it's a, but interest rates obviously are a drag in many ways. It's just, they are, on the other hand, they reflect inflation. And so for the only way, they're not simply a drag. And also, if you go cut them too much, you then get a bad stagflation.

It's like, I don't know. Tell me about the, how much of a, is that, do you think, of a thing that's lurking out there that matters? I'm very worried about that. And I think that's a bigger issue for the long term, the long term economic trajectory. Because we have a lot of evidence that when central banks are less independent, less politically independent, when they are more, under the thumb of whoever's in political power, you have much worse inflation outcomes. We've seen this. There's some very stark examples in like Turkey recently, Argentina, pre-Euro, Italy, pre-Euro, Greece. This is a big problem because if you're a politician,

you always want lower interest rates, even if you are not the king of debt in Trump's case. There's a reason why he's always liked low interest rates because, he takes on a lot of debt. And he wants to pay as little as possible on that debt. But politicians in general want generally lower interest rates because it gooses the economy in the short term. If you pump more cash into the economy, it's easier to borrow. It's easier to build stuff. It's to hire, to invest. And all of that stuff sounds great. But if the economy doesn't need that additional stimulus, if you will, that additional liquidity, then you end up over, you can overheat and you can basically push up inflation. So the reason why you have central banks that are politically

independent in places like the United States is to shield them from those short-term political pressure so that they're not under the pressure to like heat up the economy right before an election. and then, you know, ignore the potential longer-term fallout. So if Trump puts in place a lackey as Fed chair, if he succeeds also in getting Lisa Cook, who's a Fed governor, fired, and puts in place a bunch of other, you know, hand-picked people who are just going to do what he wants, regardless of their best judgment for what is good for the economy, that's really bad. that for long, again, for like medium, long-term outcomes in the U.S., you're likely to have more

inflation. And plenty of data on this. And you saw this, I mentioned all these foreign countries, but actually you saw the same thing happen here. It's part of the reason why we had the stackflation of the 70s. Right. I was thinking about that. As you said, the foreign countries, I'm old, you weren't boring them, but I'm old enough

to, I was in my freshman year at Harvard, stuff, you know, taking the introductory economics course. And Arthur Burns had, yeah, was responsive to Nixon, I think it's the conventional view. Maybe this is unfair to him personally, but whatever. He decided to be very dovish on interest rates in 71, 72. Yeah, so Nixon to LBJ, both of them leaned on the Fed. And they boosted the economy in 72, and we had a very bad, I mean, the oil shock happened too, obviously, but very bad, as you say, recession and inflation.

Right. It pushes up prices. And it's not only a question of, does. the president actually lean on the Fed, but is the Fed perceived as politically independent? Because if people start to worry that the central bank is not going to keep inflation in check, they're not going to take the punch bowl away, is the expression, you know, and the party before, you know, before everybody gets too drunk, then inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because people start to worry, well, what if my suppliers start to raise prices? I guess I should preemptively raise

prices. And then everybody raises prices anyway. People, you know, workers start to demand much higher wages, which normally sounds like a good thing, but only if there's more stuff to buy. If everybody's basically raising prices and raising wages at the same time, but the economy hasn't actually gotten any more productive and there aren't more things to buy, it's just more money chasing after the same amount of goods and that pushes up prices. It's not super intuitive, right? I don't think that people necessarily think all of this through consciously, but they act on it. They say, I don't trust that, you know, that inflation is going to be in check. So I better do all of these things to save myself, to save my business. And it's totally rational. So that's why you

want, you know, a bunch of technocrats on the Federal Reserve who are, they get things wrong. you know, I'm not saying otherwise. They're not perfect. They definitely got things wrong in their early run-up in inflation during the pandemic. But at least they are trying to get it right. At least they are thinking about their long-term mission, their dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices, as opposed to what's going to help the party or what's going to have a particular politician in the next few months. For me, some of the analysis of Trump, it's very much he's a low interest guy, as you said, for both, you know, as a debt as a chronic debtor and just because yeah he thinks it gooses the economy and he's for that

and he's a short term oriented guy but i think people have underestimated the extent to which though he's not entirely foolish i mean he wants someone in there in 28 who will goose the economy for him if he's on the ballot for his successor and again there is actual precedent for that in 72 and he doesn't care that much what happens in 2030 or something and i think that would speak i mean i would say don't you think that but of course markets aren't idiot or foolish and they they will see that beginning to happen or the prospect of that happening in late 26 or 27. So I think the degree to which we could have a Fed-related problems, let's say in the economy and investment, people aren't going to buy 5% bonds along bonds if they, you know, if they think inflation is going to go up to 4 or 5%.

So you get all kinds of knock-on effects, right, of that uncertainty at least, maybe a little more than people expect, I think, you know. It's not, it's not, it's not, people talk about the Fed thing as if it's almost like, well, he's going to lower, will he lower rates this quarter this month, but it is a... Well, yeah, like, who was it? Lutnik, the Commerce Secretary was on TV a couple of days ago saying that he thinks,

I think he said that at the next Fed meeting, which is happening relatively soon, that they should cut rates by a full percentage point, a hundred basis points, which if you don't follow these things, maybe, I understand, like you don't have any context for whether that's a lot

or a little, but it's a lot. Basically, the only times in recent memory when the Fed cut interest rates in one fell swoop by that amount were in, I think it was like March 16th, 2020, and then during the financial crisis, like in 2008. So that suggests, if the Fed were acting that way, that would mean that the economy was in real distress. Now, I don't think that they're going to listen to Howard Lutnik or Donald Trump or, you know, anybody else who's publicly job-owning them. But it's, it's not helpful. right, to have the, have the administration publicly basically saying, well, not only encouraging

the Fed to do this, but kind of threatening them with prosecutions, with firings, and various other unpleasant outcomes. And as you point out, they don't even need to fire Jake Powell because his term as chair ends. There's also this like lurking threat that I've heard some people worry about with the, this is going to get very in the weeds, but the regional Fed bank presidents. So the group of people who vote on interest rates, there's the chair, who is currently Jerome Powell. Then there are some board members who are appointed by the president, Federal Reserve board members who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. And then there's a rotating group of these regional fed presidents. They're in New York, Boston,

Atlanta, Kansas City. They represent different parts of the country. They're supposed to be like representing the interests, basically, of different regions in the country. But they also vote on interest rates. And they are all up for reappointment very soon. Normally, what happens is if you're currently in the job, you're likely to get reappointed. It's pretty much pro forma, unless you want to leave. And it's like the local business leaders, the people who are on the board of that regional, you know, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, they have a board. They decide who's going to get that job. And like I said, it's usually the person who's in the job sticks around unless they want to go or there's a big search and then they find someone new. But they're all up at the same time pretty soon. And in theory, the people that Trump appoints in Washington could

veto any one of those picks. They never have, to my knowledge. Normally, again, this is like a rubber stamp. This is just a, okay, the local business people vetted this person. They seem okay. They put a reasonably competent person in the job. And then the Fed board says, okay, yep, now we're having our next meeting. But there's a little bit of jitters out there about whether this time might be different, that Trump, once he gets his people on the board, might try to block those other people from getting their jobs, which again, normally this is not even an issue. But that's how he could cobble together enough people on the group that sets interest rates, it's called the Federal Open Market Committee, to more quickly change their path than might otherwise be the case.

So again, it's like kind of in the weeds, but I think it is a lurking risk out there for another way that Trump could screw up monetary policy and wreak a lot of damage on the U.S. economy. Yeah, he could just directly draw bone the governors in these regions. I mean, it's not as if Trump, I mean, all kinds of things that we have not thought could happen. University president getting fired of a state university. Why does that, you know, how many times the UVA, let's say that, the president's not usually intervene on that. But you know what? If they especially have a sympathetic governor in that case, but there are some of the, I mean, I just feel like people are underestimated.

People are still, I've been struck talking to economists. I don't if you find this. They are very much living in a world that for the last 40 years has been pretty, presidents have been pretty good about keeping their hands off the Fed. There's such a consensus in the profession. It's really, you know, whether you're a Republican or Democratic, you know. Because of what happened in the 70s. People are too complacent, I think, now about that Trump is not interested in these rules

and in these norms. And anyway, I feel like the Fed is an interesting thing to follow. agree. Totally agree. Okay, that's for some, but yeah, everyone's been so focused on tariffs, which is understandable and important. I think little overdone on it. I mean, the truth is about the inflation stuff, which I always wondered why people were so obsessed with that.

The standard economic, I vaguely remember, interpretation of tariffs is they're bad for the economy if you believe in sort of free trade, you know, comparative advantage and so forth, but it's a dead weight on the economy. It's not necessarily, it's inflationary in the very short term, in the goods that are tariffed. But yes.

I don't know what, 12% of our economy is imports or something. I mean, it's not like actually the whole economy is just going to go, you know, off the rails. Anyway, I feel like the inflation side of it got a little exaggerated as opposed to the general case against tariffs and then the uncertain. And then the course of political manipulation stuff. It matters to consumers, right?

If suddenly, like, we already have a housing shortage for a whole bunch of reasons unrelated to Trump. And if you tariff all of the inputs into a house, as we are doing from the lumber. the steel beams, the bathtubs and doorknobs, and, you know, basically everything in a house is being tariffed and gets more expensive at a time when housing is already short supply. It's already very difficult to build because of state and local permitting issues and labor shortages. And by the way, we're also deporting a lot of the labor force that courts in construction.

Those things matter. So I don't think it's nothing. And I think it's reasonable. for Americans to be ticked off about the price increases that they are enduring related to tariffs because this president came in saying wrongly that he was going to get prices down, right? That's never going to happen unless like we have a Great Depression, which we don't want. But at the very least, he could be not pushing prices up further. So I think it's reasonable for people to pay attention to this. Yeah, I know that's fair. But I take your point that like...

I mean, immigration could be as important. just making this up, but cutting, you know, deporting people and not letting people in could be as, oh, yeah. Yes, as important to hiking housing prices as, you know, as the particular tariffs on whatever percentage of the goods are imported. But anyway, I did the dovetailing of these is bad, right? I mean, that's not true. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, it's, it's funny for a guy who saw Biden get so damaged, you wrote about this politically by inflation, he's not been very sensitive, the obvious, I think, any concept, the obvious way is not to have inflation or yet not

to impose terrorists and not to deport immigrants and reduce the labor supply. Like those are just unambiguously inflationary, not to do them as inflation. You know what I mean to what I'm trying to say here, right? I mean, yeah, he's so it's funny that he's not actually acting in a way consistent with you would think his own political interests. Well, I think he doesn't think things through. He doesn't, he has a degree in economics from Wharton, but I think he should get his money back for that because he doesn't seem to understand how any of these things affect the economy.

As I said, sometimes there are these tacit acknowledgments that maybe tariffs are bad, like by virtue of the fact that they're rolling some of them back as part of their affordability messaging right now or their affordability agenda such as it is. So sometimes they kind of acknowledge that, yes, it is Americans who are largely paying tariffs and not just, you know, the evil foreigners. But a lot of the time, I don't know what kind of advice he's getting. I don't know how well he really understands what's happening. Or even with immigration, you know, the labor department under Trump actually

released this analysis saying that deporting lots of immigrants was going to threaten to raise food prices. Because we were talking about. construction, but obviously a huge part of the agricultural labor force is immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. A lot of them are here on visas, but not all of them. And we're deporting all of the above. We're making it harder to get visas. So that's going to put pressure on food prices as well, in addition to the human cost of all of that, obviously. So in theory, parts of his government understand that this stuff is damaging, but maybe they don't care. Like, clearly Stephen Miller has sway on immigration and not everybody else who might be worried

about food prices or the information isn't getting up to him. Like Trump will say periodically something about, oh, don't worry, like we're not going to touch the agricultural workers. We're not going to touch the restaurant workers. We're not going to deport people from Home Depot. And then they do it anyway. So I don't know. It's hard to assess how well he understands what his own administration is doing or what the implications would be, even if he does understand what they're doing, like what it would mean for the economy. No, that's so interesting, really. And I didn't know his own labor department to put out that study. Yeah. Like a couple weeks ago. Oh, wow. Last question. I'm just curious about

whether you think I may be over interpreting this. So Vance gave an interview, Vice President advance Thursday, Friday, something like that, in which he sort of went out of his way to seem more concerned about the economy than Trump did not just happy talk. And we feel what people are experiencing out there very much, I think kind of standard, what a standard politician would say if he were hearing that Trump's, you know, happy talk is not going over so well for people who, as you said earlier, are having trouble finding jobs or who see the prices continue to go up some and so forth. I also felt like, and I think. that got a fair amount of attention correctly that maybe vans is watching out for his own political

future i also wondered uh this maybe comes from my experience a long time ago in the white house i mean vance has access to a lot of economic data i'm not suggesting anything inappropriate that could be but i mean that he's getting data that you shouldn't see ahead of time or anything like that that's separate but just if you're there you know literally you can obviously have access to a ton of to the economists at every department who can see stuff and and and um i wonder if he really kind of thinks it's going to get a little worse, the economy. I mean, it felt like I watched the clip of him doing this, and I'm not some expert on that I don't really like watching him much, so I don't watch him much.

But I felt like he was maybe, you know, sat through a briefing from someone, which was, you know what, we're seeing more signs of slowing or seeing signs of problems here and there. You might wonder why he wouldn't say to him this way. He would then think maybe I should get out there a little bit more on the, we understand there's. And I think he said something like it could get a little worse before it gets better. I don't know. Do you think, I just wonder, it just struck me that maybe.

where he sees some stuff that would suggest a little more of a slowdown than maybe some of his supporters certainly think. I don't know. I don't think we need to hypothesize about whether he's getting secret briefings warning him about secret data. I mean, we have public data. Well, that's right. And he's also the link to the business community in many ways for Trump. And so he is talking to actual CEOs who are busy sucking up to Trump and coming to the state dinners. And who knows if they're telling him and they're perfectly appropriate of this, that means they shouldn't tell them that, gee, you know, we see some problems down the road or whatever, right? Yeah, definitely.

I've talked with other people in the administration or who have approached the administration who are trying to find whatever in roads they can to explain how damaging some of these policies are on tariffs, on immigration, on the Fed. It's interesting, like this is a whole other tangent, but a lot of members of the business community have been eerily silent as, these destructive things are happening in the economy. Even some of the business industry groups, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, they'll, like, complain a little bit, but not nearly as much as you would think relative to the scale of the damage that is being inflicted, especially when you consider how vocal many of them were under Biden and Obama, for example, about how they elevated uncertainty, for example, much, much worse now. They've been very quiet, and I think part of the reason why is maybe obvious that nobody

wants to put a target on their back, right? They don't want to be the loan complainant out there saying, hey, guys, this is really bad for the economy, this is really bad for businesses. You're hurting manufacturing, even though you want to be helping manufacturing, you're hurting investment, et cetera, et cetera. and they all think that they can get what they want achieved more effectively, I guess, behind closed doors. So they are asking for meetings. I don't know about Vance.

I assume that they are, but I know with other members, you know, the economic groups within, you know, CEA, NEC, commerce, like they're all asking for these more direct private discussions to relay their concerns, and I think that's happening. And so they are probably, you know, members of the administration are probably getting that information. Whether it gets to the present, I don't know. He does talk to members of the business community, it seems, when they're calling and sucking up to him and probably asking for favors or for preferable treatment on particular tariffs. There's been a bunch of reporting from pro-publica on that as well. So these relationships matter, not only to, like, getting information to members of the administration about bad things that they're doing,

but also for getting little carve-outs so that maybe my company isn't as affected as much as my competitors are. So I think some of that is happening. But if you're asking about J.D. Vance specifically saying, I feel you're paid. I don't think any of that even needs to happen because we saw it at the polls, right? We saw it at the polls a couple weeks ago where Republicans. Republicans took a drubbing because Americans are pissed off about high prices and, you know, some things that have to do with the president and some things that don't, as I've just been saying, like plenty of problems with droughts affecting certain grocery items, the electricity problems around the country, electricity prices are going up. That's generally, it's not, I mean, there are some things that the administration is doing to make it worse, like canceling big solar projects, for example, or making it harder for them to get But for the most part, that's like a longstanding problem that's just been building up and getting worse, particularly as there's more demand for electricity from these data centers, blah, blah, blah, like it's not exclusively about policy, not exclusively about Trump's policy, I should say. But you're seeing people complain at the polls. You're seeing it in polling data surveys out there. And you are seeing it in some of the, you know, harder economic data. Yeah, it doesn't take a genius or like a secret meeting for J.D. Vance or others to notice that this is a problem for them. And Democrats are taking advantage of it, right? Democrats, not just in this past election, but like in lots of messaging right now, they're hammering home on affordability and how the Trump administration is making life more expensive. And they're not only raising tariffs, but they're taking away your subsidies for your health.

insurance. So Democrats see this as a winning issue. Whether or not the economy deteriorates a lot more, people are anxious enough about it now that, yeah, the administration should be paying attention. Yeah, very interesting. I'll let you go. And thank you for that. I mean, final point, I guess we'll know much more. You'll be reporting on this and writing on this and speaking about this for us and for the next day to day, week to week. But I suppose we should maybe reconvene what maybe just after Christmas. I feel like we'll know a lot more, right? I mean, Christmas is such a huge season for the economy, and also we'll have data from November and December.

Yes. So, you know, knock on wood. So we should have a, like, a New Year's conversation about that. I mean, don't you, will we know more? Am I wrong about that? I feel like that's... Yeah, I mean, we'll know more. The Fed will have met by then we'll have some more inflation.

Christmas shopping date is pretty big, right? Yep. We'll see what happens with that. That's a really important time for businesses. That's when they get in the black for the year. And a lot of business. businesses that are sustaining big hits because of the tariffs, they are really counting on a robust holiday shopping season. I haven't really seen anything to suggest right now that they

won't get that. But we'll have to see. So, yeah, would love to chat more. Okay. Well, you know, people should keep up with you on the full work, on video, on, obviously with your newsletter and on various forms of social media and stuff. So thank you, Catherine, for taking the time this morning. Thanks, Bill. And thank you all for joining us. Thank you.