Odd Lots - Trump Economic Advisor, Stephen Miran, on Tariffs and Tax Cuts

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

The Trump administration seems to have a lot of big ideas about reshaping America, including its economy. We've seen the unveiling (and delaying) of sweeping tariffs aimed at boosting US manufacturing. The 'Big, Beautiful Bill' is currently working its way through Congress and features a lot of supply-side economic ideas, including an extension of tax cuts. So do all of these things work together to boost growth? What happens if that growth doesn't materialize? What is the administration's ultimate vision for the US economy? And what are they seeing right now in terms of things like inflation and employment? We speak with Stephen Miran, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers at the White House.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Jill Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Such a cliche to say that there is a lot going on right now. But there's a lot going on. It was CPI Day today. Yes, it was. And it came in softer than expected. Actually, it was a really unexpected figure. I think all the economists surveyed by Bloomberg had the number higher than what it came in as. And so kind of a surprise. Kind of a surprise, of course, when the tariffs were announced in early April,

some people, you know, a lot of people reasonably thought they were going to go up. So far, four straight months of cooling to the downside. We obviously, that means we have a lot of just sort of straight up macro uncertainty. and B, a lot of policy uncertainty still between both the ongoing trade discussions and, of course, the one big beautiful bill and what's going to happen on taxes and spending. In short, there is a lot to talk about. We really do have the perfect guest, I think, to talk about all of this. We're going to be speaking with Stephen Myron. He is the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors at the White House. So we can ask them all these questions about the state of the economy and policy.

Stephen, thank you so much for coming on odd lots. Look, thanks for having me. I've been a big fan for a long time, and it's a real honor and a privilege to be here. Amazing. We're going to clip that and send that around. All right, if CPI had come in hot today, I would have started with a question on that, but I'm not going to start by giving you a softball on CPI. I'm curious about the other side. Right now, how do you perceive the momentum on labor in this economy or just the growth momentum on this economy? How robust is it? Look, I think that the economic data have been coming in pretty good. And you mentioned CPI, you mentioned inflation. I do think it's worth noting that in all four months since the president was inaugurated, inflation CPI is surprised to the downside. And I think that was very much in contrast to lots of people's expectations. And we also, you know, experienced the same on the upside, right? We had three, beats in a row on Jobs Day for jobs numbers. I think that, you know, the underlying economy has been

pretty healthy. There has been whipping around of the sentiment data, but I think that the correlation between the sentiment data and the real economic activity has really declined in recent years. The sentiment data are driven by stocks, right, in volatility and financial markets. They're driven by political sentiment and people's reactions to policy if they like it or if they don't like it. But there's been minimal connection between the two of them. And if you look at the real economic data, it's been pretty good. And yeah, okay, so the first quarter GDP, was, you know, a hair negative. But if you looked at underlying private, you know, final domestic demand,

which strips out the really volatile components like inventories and imports, you know, that was high twos, almost 3%. Right. You know, so like underlying growth in the first quarter was pretty good. Then, you know, the GDP trackers for the second quarter seem like they're 3% plus, almost 4%. You know, I think it's really hard, you know, I think you really got to squint to find, you know, sort of bad news in the economic data.

Okay, Tracy. so the Fed doesn't need to cut is what I'm here. No, I'm just kidding. Anyway, Tracy, go on. Just on the labor market, how are you thinking about the interaction between the administration's immigration policies and overall employment? Because on the one hand, it seems like deportations might be helping to keep the unemployment rate kind of low right now.

But on the other hand, you know, if you deport enough people, you start to get worker shortages, maybe you get higher wages, maybe you get business disruption and things like that. Let me make a couple of observations. One, you know, there were lots of predictions, again, from, you know, the typical doomsayers and chicken littles out there that when the president shut down the border to protect Americans, that job creation would fall out of bed. And again, that has not been the case. There's no evidence of that in the data. Two, if you do look for slack in the labor market, if you do look for pockets of weakness, you are going to find it in exactly, exactly the cohorts of the labor market that are in direct competition. with illegal immigrants who come invading over the border, right?

You will find the unemployment rate for people in the 20 to 24-year-old age cohort is about twice the national average. It's like 8.2 or something. You will find the unemployment rate for people in the 16-to-19-year-old cohort is about three times or more the national average. It's like 13 and a half or something like that. These are the folks who are in direct competition with illegal migrants. These are folks who are high school students, college students, just finished one or the other,

got their GED, dropped out, whatever it is. These are people who are at the start of their careers who are the most in competition with illegal migrants. And that's exactly where the slack is in the labor market. And these are the people that we have to protect because there is so much evidence in the labor economics literature that the initial conditions when you graduate, the conditions of the labor market, when you get your first job, affect your career for decades to come. And if you graduate school into a bad labor market, you can have worse wage profile decades into the future relative to someone who graduated into a strong. labor market. And there are reasons why, because skill accumulation matters. You know, what your last job was matters for what your next one is. And it's so important that we get these young people on the job ladder, on the skills ladder to start, even if it's something like a summer job in high

school at a construction site where, you know, like you're learning something important, like when the boss says you show up to work at 830, you show up to work at 830. Like that's the rule and you do it, as opposed to sort of starting your first job, you know, four or five, six years later, and you show up at 10 or 11 because that's when you feel like showing up, right? And so it's so important that we get people on the jobs ladder to start their career, to start learning skills of all sorts. They can climb that career ladder and make good lives for themselves. And I really do believe that if you get this process started,

not only does it help them now, but it also helps them throughout their careers and will start to address problems like declined labor force participation among prime age males, for example. Right. A lot of those people had gotten on the jobs ladder right out of school, I think that you'd have higher participation rates there. So this is all super important, but you also brought up another issue, which is prices, which is inflation, right? And I think, you know, if you remember a year ago, there was a lot of conversation about how immigration had helped to, so, you know, quote, rebalance the labor market and folks of all sorts were praising it for helping to calm inflation. I think that's really wrong because, well, A, I just discussed the slack in labor market being exactly where the competition with the migrants is. But two, if you take a large number of people, right, a large number of new entrants into the country, and you throw them into what is a only sluggishly adjusting capital stock, things like housing, things like hospital and medical care, things like infrastructure and schools, the price or the quality of those things will go up or the quality will go down, which means the quality adjusted price goes up. Put another way, if you throw 10 million new residents into a fixed supply of housing or only sluggishly adjusting supply of housing, that's going to put upward pressure on rents.

And the connection, the empirical relationship between rents and measured inflation is much, much, much, much stronger than the empirical relationship between wages and measured inflation. And so the inflationary effect of throwing millions of new residents into a relatively fixed supply of housing dramatically outweighs any disinflationary effects through the labor market, which again have come at the expense of these young Americans who are trying to start their careers. So I think that the overall interpretation of these policies in the economist commentariat has been really backwards and really wrong. I think that large-scale immigration was pretty inflationary. If you throw a positive population shock into an economy, you know, traditionally it will be inflationary. And there are studies of this in, you know, German reunification. There's been a number of studies about what happened when German, you know, when East Germany and West Germany were unified. And then you had tons of immigrants going from East Germany to West Germany.

And that was very inflation for West Germany. You know, that type of inflation caused the Bundesbank to start raising rates, which led to the breaking of the Bank of England, pound of sterling to the Deutsche Mark. You know, this is not a new concept. This is a concept that's out there. And I think that a lot of folks have got it backwards. There was also a large fiscal expansion in Germany at that time because they sort of recognized that that was needed to integrate the East German economy. But I want to talk about tariffs. Here's a question that I've had for a long time. I hear different goals of tariffs. Sometimes it's about, okay, it's going to bring in this much revenue. Sometimes it's about it's a matter of national security because we can't be so reliant on foreign matters. manufacturing for various reasons. Sometimes it's about jobs, et cetera. What, you know, setting aside what the ultimate trade deal look like? Like, what are the benchmarks that we should use to see, did these

tariffs achieve the goal? What does that look like? Yeah. So this is another great question. And so I want to point out that there's not just one set of tariffs. There's a lot of sets, there's a lot of sets of tariffs. There's a 301s and the 232s and naipa tariffs. And they each have their own particular statutory, you know, statutory justification. Some of them are, you know, national security. Some of them are, you know, unfairness. Some of them are the emergency of trade deficits. So they're all sort of distinct. But if you were looking to sort of thematically look across them and say, you know, what are we doing here? I think you'd sort of start to see two, two broad lessons. One is imbalances, trade deficits, right? A sustained, accumulated series of trade deficits,

international imbalances will lead to economic vulnerabilities. It will lead to financial and vulnerabilities. It is unsustainable. If it keeps ongoing, it leads to places that aren't great. On top of that, it's unfair to American workers and firms. It puts them at unfairly uncompetitive ground. It disadvantages them relative to our trading partners. And there's a real element of fairness. There's a real element of sustainability, economically and financially. and the idea that we should start addressing those imbalances, you know, sort of is a strong driver of what's going on with, is a very primary driver of what's going on with the tariffs. And by the way, you know, if we address those imbalances, if we bring those imbalances down, it creates more balanced trade, which is more sustainable, right? It will create more resilient, more robust trade.

And more trade, by the way. If other countries open their markets to our products, it will be a world of more trade, not less trade, but more balanced trade. and that will be more resilient, more sustainable, and actually increase the longevity of the global trading system, which I think is something we should, you know, which I think would be a good thing. The other thing that's really going on is, as you said, national security. It's really important that the United States be able to defend itself, its alliance partners, preserve open shipping lanes without having to rely on strategic adversaries or hostile countries for key parts to do that. If we have to rely on a country like China or somebody else for key parts to make bullets or tanks or satellites or other things that we need to keep our people safe,

it's not a good situation. We don't want to have to ask permission to keep ourselves safe, right? We want to be able to keep ourselves safe out of our own power to do so. And so one thing that a lot of people say to me is, well, why don't you just balance the, you know, balance international deficits with services? And I think that you really have to think about national security here too. You know, like I think that services are great. And I love that the United States is, you know, the world's biggest export of services. And I want to sell as many services as we can, right? Like, that's, that's fabulous. We should do more of that. But selling services doesn't address the national security dilemma because you need manufacturing too.

And if you think about it, the United States just took steps to open the Red Sea to shipping, right? We don't really ship through the Red Sea. It's our trading partners that, largely speaking, shipped through the Red Sea. But we took, you know, we exerted kinetic force to open it. We needed a robust manufacturing sector to do that. We will continue to, need a robust manufacturing sector to do that, no amount of selling financial services or of selling internet advertisements or of selling legal services will be able to open the Red Sea. You need kinetic force. And so it's not a case of one or the other. It's a case of diversification and both and saying, yes, services are good, services are important. But we also need to be thinking about manufacturing

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Bloomberg Television, Radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. It seems to me that the administration is very focused on perceived inequalities or injustices with other countries, with foreign trading partners or just foreign allies in terms of trade, in terms of military spending, et cetera. And I guess my question is, do you see or do you have any policies to address perceived economic inequality within the U.S.? Why is all the focus international versus domestic policy? You know, the best way to approach that subject in the United States is to create opportunity for everyone so that everyone can work better themselves and share in American prosperity. And that's exactly what the president did in his first term, right? The same policy mix from the president's first term, trade renegotiation, tax reform, deregulation, energy abundance, same exact mix in the first term that led to 3.5% unemployment, negligible inflation. and historic gains in income for, in real median household incomes, historic reductions in poverty rates,

you know, new lows and unemployment rates for various disadvantaged groups in America. You know, this was a very successful recipe. And the best thing that you can do for folks who are less well off is to create a situation in which firms want to hire them, in which firms want their labor, want them as employees. And the best way to make firms want to hire more employees is to create a pro-business environment in which firms are doing well because the better they do, the more employees they want, right? And so that's why we're focused on creating an environment of economic growth, of economic dynamism, where firms are prospering and therefore hiring workers and paying them

well and workers are experiencing real wage growth. You know, that's what we're trying to do. I want to go back to manufacturing. And I find this to be a very compelling point. That is many services and digital ads that you sell, it doesn't, that will never be from a security standpoint, even if it is from a dollar standpoint, it'll never be from a security standpoint the same as being able to build something in that kind of sovereignty. With the last administration, the Biden administration,

like I sort of understood, you know, I think they had actually similar, they clearly have very similar concerns and you saw it through chips, you saw it through the loan programs office with things like energy and so forth. I had this very sort of, I understood their like theory

about like, okay, de-risking and subsidies and there were a lot of like new, ostensibly advanced manufacturing, facilities that went up. How does this administration actually think about like pushing the U.S. to the frontier of advanced manufacturing when it comes to some of the energy stuff? Some of that's being curtailed. I don't hear much about chips. I don't like how how do you think about like the incentive structure such that we get sort of, you know, risky capax heavy investment here so that we can still sort of build the things, whether it's chips or larger things,

that are important for national security. One thing about industrial policy that's important to keep in mind is that you have to think about sustainability. And I mean economic sustainability here. And if an industry is reliant upon government subsidies to exist and the government subsidies go away, you know, it's very likely that the industry goes away too. And you just set yourself up for another wave of deindustrialization. And that was the fatal flaw at the heart of the Biden administration's industrial policy

and all the climate stuff that they were engaged in was it was. industries that that were designed to be permanently, you know, sort of permanently reliant. And so if you want to create a sustainable manufacturing boom, what you need to do is to create a pro-business environment to make America more competitive and to make it a place where people want to do business. And that's what we're, that's what we're aiming to do. The deregulatory agenda is incredibly important for that, incredibly important for that. Economists are so underappreciative of the importance of regulation because it's difficult to study. It's not quantitative. You can study interest rates quantitatively. Joe has a 3% interest rate. Tracy has a 7% interest rate. Let's

compare outcomes. That's unfair. That's unfair. Actually true, by the way. You can study taxes quantitatively. Sorry, just to be clear on this, I just want to, national security is like a public good, right? And does the market price public goods? Well, I mean, like, when we're, even if we're just talking about normal defense, there's always this public investment that is sustained. And the big defense contractors always need public money coming in, et cetera. And so when you talk about this, like, national security, to spending. I get your point about sustainability. When we're talking about this, isn't there always going to be sort of a level of public backing that's necessary when it comes to something like securing the national security? Oh, there absolutely will be. And that's that national security is forever, right? And so there always will be in a, you know, the primary element of the government backing this stuff. And that's going to continue. Also, industrial policy, I think, tends to be more successful with national security because we have a better idea of what

works and what doesn't work than, you know, someone in a government trying to predict consumer preferences 10 years from now. You know, that's really hard. It's hard to predict what consumers are going to want 10 years from now, this type of car, that type of car. But it's, you know, much easier to listen to the military and say, we need this weapon or our soldiers are going to, you know, have trouble. Right. And so it's easier to pick winners and losers as well. And there will always be government backing for national security. You know, you can sort of do things to ensure more of that supply chain becomes domestic. And I would expect that you, I would expect that you see that type of thing over time. I think we have to tie this back together to the overall policy program,

making America a more competitive place to do business, a better environment to do business in. And some of the tax incentives that are in the big, beautiful bill for investment, like full equipment expensing, full R&D expensing, full expense to give new factories, these are very substantial incentives to invest in manufacturing capacity in America. If you look at the academic research, the paper by, you know, Guder O'Reich and Zwick at all from a couple years ago, they found that the full expensing was the best bang for the buck in terms of incentivizing investment, right? So the combination of cutting the red tapes that firms can do what they want without begging permission from Washington, creating very strong tax incentives for investment, creating energy abundance

to make it cheap to do stuff, opening foreign markets to American products, that American products are more competitive. This is a very powerful overall combination for saying that America is a good place to do manufacturing and America is a good place to do business. Well, let's talk about the big, beautiful bill for a second. And one of the things, that has really caught the market's eye is this Section 899 idea, which would basically tax foreign holders of U.S. bonds. So I've seen this described as a retaliation tax that's targeting countries with which the U.S. again, sees them as having unfair tax policies. And so I'm curious, like, what exactly is the strategic goal of this provision? Is it mostly to try to, you know,

incentivize foreign governments to maybe change their tax policies so as to make them better or more beneficial to the U.S. Or is it a revenue generator at a time when, you know, clearly the deficit is getting bigger and people are worried about that? Or is it maybe a first step, a tiny step, to revamping the role of the U.S. dollar in the global financial system? What is it exactly? This provision is about the OECD Global Inomen Tax and us trying to prevent American tech

sovereignty from being exported overseas. We shouldn't be in a situation in which the taxes that American companies pay can be automatically determined by what's going on in other countries with their domestic tax rates. That shouldn't be the situation. And also, you know, the OECD minimum tax process really disadvantages American firms by its structure and advantages Chinese firms because it's all about how you calculate corporate profits. And many Chinese firms aren't run for corporate profits. They're run for very specific state-directed activities and goals as opposed to profit maximization. And so this is something that would even further exacerbate competitiveness issues that we suffer. But it's about that.

It's also about the digital services taxes. You know, countries in particularly in Europe levied these taxes on digital services that just happen to, by design, have cutoffs that only affect American companies, right? They treat American companies like piggy banks and like free revenue. and it's not fair. And we're singled out and we're targeted. And this is to discourage that activity. If you talk to the Europeans, they'll tell you something like, you know, these companies, these activities, they're not taxed anywhere. And if you're not going to tax it, then we're going to tax it. But that's simply not true because these products are taxed in Europe by the value added tax in the same way anything else that's sold is taxed the value added tax. If you sell a widget or a car or a digital advertisement in Europe, it, you know, it falls into that scheme.

And so it is taxed. And this is something that singles. us out, 899 is primarily a disincentive to those activities, right? We shouldn't have our trading partners single out our companies for unfair additional taxation. We shouldn't have other countries try and absorb American tax sovereignty into their own policy, into their own policymaking. This stuff should be undone. And 899 serves as an incentive to undo that stuff, services as an incentive to remove those unfair policies, the discriminatory policies. And hopefully, you know, I would be happy if it never got triggered because the digital services taxes got dropped and because some, you know, other countries deemed that U.S. policy

already satisfied the OECD criteria. That would be a great outcome. This is Caroline Hyde. And I'm Ed Ludlow inviting you to join us for Bloomberg Tech, a daily podcast focusing exclusively on technology, innovation and the future of business. Every weekday, we bring you the top headlines from the world's biggest tech companies. From finance to defense, AI to entertainment and from startups to the magnificent seven. We highlight the latest stories of the people. and companies pushing the tech sector to new frontiers and the politics that shape global tech markets. We do this all every weekday, then bring you the most important conversations and analysis in our podcast.

Search for Bloomberg Tech on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. Join us every afternoon on your commute home and stay ahead of the tech news cycle. That's the Bloomberg Tech podcast. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. And I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts. So I take the point that this is part of a tax strategy. But at the same time, you know, big foreign investors, when they're thinking about what to invest in, they have a lot of choices. They could buy U.S. Treasury. They could buy a 10-year JGB. I don't know, whatever. And I'm curious, you know, with an added tax, that would seem to change the calculation a little bit. Obviously, you've had people talking about just the volatility and uncertainty introduced by the administration's economic policies. So how do you actually keep American debt competitive to global investors? Well, so that's a misinterpretation of 899.

899 doesn't apply to most portfolio flows. And so the assets that you listed would be exempt from it. It's mostly targeted at corporate profits because that's what the minimum OECD minimum tax is about. And that's what digital services taxes are about. And so it's a like for like. It doesn't touch things like the portfolio flows you described. And all of that is just has nothing to do with 890s. Let's talk about the debt more broadly and maybe then a little micro.

From time to time, you often hear people say the national debt is this really big crisis. It often has to do with politics, as we all know, and suddenly people go in and out of concern about the size of the debt, depending on who's in the White House. It's fine. I get that. But why is it so important that all of the 2017 tax cuts are extended? If the debt is really something that is, you know, sort of existentially concerning, I get you're going to, you know, you say, okay, well, there are spending cuts. This is, there's going to be some growth. Therefore, the trajectory is not going to be as bad as it was. But if debt is at an existential level, why is it so important that all the tax cuts be extended?

And in some case expanded, like such an in the case of, say, like, you know, the salt deduction. So it's so important that we don't, that we don't allow tax rates to move higher. because higher tax rates are really bad for the economy and they're really bad for economic growth. And they're really bad for competitiveness. We want an environment in which firms want to do business, in which people want to work, and in which firms want to hire the people who want to work. And low taxes are conducive to all that. High taxes disincentivize work.

They disincentivize investment. They disincentivize business activity. They disincentivize profit making because the government takes a bigger and bigger share of all of those activities. And so we want an economy that is dynamic, that's efficient, and one with abundant resources that produces abundant goods and services. And that's a low-tax environment. And that's always been the story of supply-side economics always. Now, I think that the conversation about the deficit gets distorted by the CBO score.

And let me explain that a little bit, which is that in order to pass legislation through the reconciliation process, which allows you to pass legislation with a simple majority instead of a 60, you know, instead of a 60 vote, super majority for overcoming a cloture vote or a filibuster. There are very specific rules that you have to follow to get through the reconciliation process. Now, I'm not an expert on it. I understand like 10% of it and like I'm involved in the government. There are people who are like really, really masters of these rules. I'm not one of them, but I'm going to tell you a little bit about it, which is that in

order to go through reconciliation, every item in the bill has to be judged to be primarily about the budget. The only way to prove that you're primarily about the budget is to have the CBO score it and say that this score means that you're primarily about the budget. Now, the CBO score is involved in that process of passing a reconciliation bill through very Byzantine rules with very specific legislative purpose in mind, but it is not designed to be a comprehensive view of the totality of budget items that would affect the fiscal outlook over coming years. And so, for example, tariff revenue, right? They only just scored this late last week. And by the way, at the request of Senator Schumer, you know, that was not included in the score for the one big budget, the one big beautiful bill.

But you'd have to be crazy to think that about $3 trillion of revenue from tariffs didn't matter when discussing the outlook for the deficit. I mean, like, that just strikes me as nuts, right? Like better economic growth, right? Through the combination of taxes, of tax policy, deregulation, energy abundance, trade negotiation, we're going to get growth to 3%. 3% growth brings an additional $4 trillion of revenue over the 10-year budget window. Through pushing out the supply side of the economy, supply-side policies push out the supply side.

Positive supply-side policy brings down price pressures because you're increasing the supply of goods and services, as opposed to stimulating demand while regulating the supply side into brittleness. That creates inflation. What we're doing will bring down inflation by pushing out supply. We get inflation down, interest expenses will follow. Inflation, durability down, interest expenses will follow. If those return to where they were before COVID, that's an end. another $3 trillion plus over the budget window. None of that stuff is really credibly included

in the score of the bill because of the very specific rules that CBO follows that Congress assigned to it for the purpose of obeying a very Byzantine reconciliation process that's not designed to be a big picture of the totality of things that go into the deficit. And now what I just listened for you is like three to four percentage points of GDP of deficit reduction. By the way, Tracy, I just want to make it clear to anyone listening, I was not complaining about expansion of the salt deduction. I do, you know, I live here in Manhattan, so I don't want anyone to think that that was a complaint. All right. Noted. Okay, but on the subject of the bill and, you know, forecast for the deficit and things like that, it does seem like a lot of this is a big bet on economic growth, right? And growth

will make up for lost revenue from tax cuts and increased spending on things like the military or whatever. What happens if the growth doesn't materialize? Do you have like contingency plans for that scenario? Well, I just told you that tariffs would bring in about $3 trillion over a decade. And I also told you that if interest rates come back down to where they were before COVID, that's another $3 trillion plus. But we still don't know what the trade deals are going to look like, though. We don't. We don't. But, you know, what the president said when he was on the campaign trail was that he wanted 10 to 20 percent tariff. on the entire world and 50 to 60 percent tariffs on China. And what we've got now is sort of in the ballpark of that, right? So, you know, we don't know what the ultimate trade deals will look

like, you know, but I'm optimistic that we'll start to see a lot of deals come out as we get close to the July 9th deadline because of the way these are structured, that each country is going through certain steps. And those steps will hopefully conclude as we get close to that deadline. The tax bill will hopefully be passed roughly a month from now, less than a month from now as well. And so, you know, I do see a lot of this uncertainty starting to resolve in in coming weeks. One of the ways in which the one big, beautiful bill might have some fiscal contraction is through Medicaid and Medicaid work requirement. What is the goal there? The academics say that there are very few people who are on Medicaid right now who are just not working, that this is a lot of

extra paperwork, et cetera. There is not some big block out there of people who could be working but aren't and collecting Medicaid. And they say, okay, well, this will just end up through paperwork and other hassles. People will lose their insurance due to the difficulty of increased difficulty of accessing it. What is the goal? Is it about getting more people in the workforce? Or is it about shrinking the overall spending of this program? Well, they're related. You know, they're related. And there's always moral hazard effects. from these types of programs. And what we want to do is slightly improve the tradeoff.

And, you know, I'm optimistic that it'll result in, that it'll result in budget savings. And I'm also pessimistic that if the one big beautiful bill doesn't pass and we have a $4 trillion tax hike and, you know, a 4% percent of decline and a 4 percentage point decline in GDP, that, you know, like many more millions of people will lose health insurance as a result, you know, like 8, 9 million people, I think, you know, according to calculations from my team.

So it's really important that we, that we've not let that happen. happen. So we've talked a lot about the idea of tariffs and uncertainty and the impact on businesses. And you say you're optimistic that, you know, things will get better as deals are announced. And I'm very curious what your day to day actually is like as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and how much you're talking to, you know, business owners, investors and people like that. Are you mostly hold up in an office or are you out and about, you know, meeting local businesses? How does it work? work, exactly. So a little bit of everything. So, you know, you started this off by talking about trade and tariffs. And this is a good time to disclaim that I'm not a trade negotiator, you know, that I run the Council of Economic Advisors, not the Council of Economic Deciders, which is fun, you know, because that means that I don't have the actual responsibility for making it for proposing it. There are other people that close it, not me. And of course, the president is ultimately the guy who closes the deal and that comes in and makes it even better at the end. What I will say is that,

I do a lot of what you said, which is, you know, trying to get the administration's economic message, explain, explain economic policy, explain why we're doing what we're doing as we've been doing right now. And, you know, today I've got, you know, sort of a total, this is, I guess, my fourth of six total speaking engagements today. At least we're not last. That's good. Yes, no, you're not. And that's a big part of my job is communicating, communicating why we're doing what we're doing and what we expect to happen. to folks. And then there's a lot of analysis that happens internally, too. On a day-to-day basis, you know, the Council of Economic Advisors is really the internal think tank, economics think tank for the White House. And we provide economic analysis and economic advice and economic policy analysis to the president and also to all, you know, all of the other principles in the administration. And so on a day-to-day basis, we could have incoming from, you know, someone saying, what would the effect of this sanction on that country be to this, you know,

commodity, or what would the effect of, you know, of this change in a tax rate be on labor supply? Or what would the effect of a change in this regulation be on gasoline prices? And that could come in from any quarter at all. And then, of course, the folks who are asking want to talk about it and sort of understand why or what we think could be done to improve or mitigate or whatever it is that we want to do. And so what we do is we just provide a lot of economic analysis and advice to a lot of different parts of the administration. And it's always, you know, it's always a new, a new policy question, you know, multiple times a day. There seems to be this one sticking point, at least one of the

cards that China seems to hold is rare earths. And according to the president in a truth social post this morning, they're going to start selling them again, the Walshiel Journal having reported not long after that, that, okay, it's going to be six months and they may revisit it. From your perspective, is this the type of thing that the public sector in the U.S. should figure out a way to incentivize or spend directly on creating new sources of supply? Like, is this the type of thing that, like, from your perspective, would make sense for something like, you know, we're going to need these commodities? It does not seem great to be entirely dependent on one country. Like, should the government spend to figure out new sources here? So my opinion and my advice would be absolutely yes. And, you know, this is in response to decades of China basically subsidizing all parts of this supply chain to drive everyone else out of business. And every time in any country there's new project, China comes in with even more heavily subsidized product in that market to drive them out of business. And so as a result, they've basically monopolized the supply chain. But I think what you're describing is the best possible argument that they made the argument for,

the president's policies even better than I ever could, right? And the drama that's played out over, over rare earth has made the argument for the president's policies better than I thought possible because this is exactly the type of thing that we should not be reliant on. And, you know, it underlines the critical importance of this stuff, right? Like, we have this part that, you know, these critical inputs that, you know, like we should not have the vulnerabilities that we have. And so, you know, it really has, it really has, has shown a, spotlight on why we're doing what we're doing. And I really think, as I said, proves why what we're doing is important better than I thought possible. Okay, here's my last question. Who loves tariffs more,

Trump or you? I think, look, you know, everybody in this administration loves tariffs. And I think there's a reason why tariffs are an incredible tool. They have persuaded our trading partners to enter negotiations about dropping trade barriers they never ever would have entertained without them. You know, the United States has been writing, you know, letters to our, to our defense alliance partners for many years asking them to spend more on defense. And for many decades, it went nowhere, right? You have to be willing to show that you're serious and that you're willing to do what it takes to shake things up to get the change that you need. And I think it's been, it's been spectacularly effective. It's been spectacularly effective at doing that. Retaliation has been minimal. The only country that's meaningfully retaliated has been China, which is a substantial success. story. Revenue is pouring in, you know, is a nice side effect of what we're doing. And I think that

we're all on the same page about that. Like, I think that this is, this has been a fabulous, successful tool and experiment. For my entire, for our entire career, the big question has been, when will Germany start spending more money? And they actually are. Stephen Myron, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. I really appreciate you taking the time and I hope to have you back, maybe when some of these deals are in it. Thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure. see, I really enjoyed that conversation. One thing that I think is interesting to me is to just sort of, you know, some of the stuff about the philosophy of like, okay, there's all these like goals that are kind of bipartisan at some point, in some level or in very much so, particularly

around manufacturing, particularly about Chinese dependent. So interesting to hear the sort of philosophy of like what you do about these issues. Yeah. A couple of things stuck out for me. So one is the importance of tariff revenue in deficit calculation. which, again, like, if we're thinking about the trade deals, I wonder if that influences the decision. If forecasts for the deficit are based on a presumption that we are going to be charging tariffs for all these goods, then, you know, I don't know what happens if we suddenly strike, like, an amazing tariff deal for the U.S. And then the other thing that really stood out to me is, again, like, the importance of economic growth in a lot of these calculations. And it really all

seems to boil down to that big bet that all of this is going to help the U.S. economy grow even more. And that's going to be the thing that offsets everything else. Yes. And I think like the economic growth through like in theory, like the optimal tax structure in theory, regulatory improvement on the supply side, growth through, you know, greater energy supply. Like these are things that like at this point, by the way, we are recording this June 11th. They seem like they're hard to disprove, right? So you have a lot of these sort of third party organizations coming out. It's like, no, they're not going to be this won't raise growth that much.

And then the White House says yes. I think at this point, you know, obviously like none of the forecasters expect a major boon to growth from the one big beautiful bill. But as Stephen argued like he, according to him, economists aren't good at forecasting the benefits of deregulation. So it's like, well, maybe we need to revisit it. Yeah. Well, I'm also curious about the time frame, right? Like, so no one's expecting a big immediate boom in economic growth. But, like, when does it actually start to kick in?

And how do you trace it back to deregulation and supply-side policies and all those things? I don't know. We should have asked him that. Yeah, well, you know, next time. Hopefully, he said it was on the recording. He said he's a big fan, right? Yeah. Like, that was actually in the episode.

He's locked in now. Okay. Okay. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Stephen Myron. He's at Steve Myron. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashobin at Dashbot, and

Kail Brooks at Kail Brooks. From more oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g.g. slash oddlots. And if you enjoy oddlots, if you like it when we dig into some of the Trump administration's economic policies, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes, absolutely add free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

On April 4, 23, around two in the morning, a man will was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16.