One of President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers was met with a fact check during an appearance on Fox Business.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, appeared Thursday morning on “Varney & Co.,” where host Stuart Varney confronted him with bad economic polling amid the war in Iran.
“Another poll on the public and and voters’ response to the economy, 47 percent of voters say current economic conditions are poor, 73 percent say the economy is getting worse,” Varney said. “Let me express an opinion: I don’t think that changes until we get $3 gas. It seems oil prices, gas prices, they’re going to be higher for longer. What do you say to that?”
Hassett insisted the economy was stronger than voters perceived.
“The truth is, as you know, we had a solid GDP number come out today that had a massive amount of capital spending,” Hassett said. “The GDP would be twice as big except there were so many imported capital goods. One of the things, I got a chart from my staff that said the quality of imports has never been so high because we’re bringing stuff that creates jobs and output going forward. You saw the initial claims were lowest they’ve been since the 1960s, government employment is the lowest since World War II, we are doing everything to get our house in order and that’s going to show up, already it’s showing up in people’s pockets, as you saw in the personal income data.”
“In the end people vote their wallets,” he added, as Varney chuckled, “and I don’t trust surveys.”
Varney interrupted with some hard numbers.
“You’ve got to look at the numbers,” Varney said. “An average of $4.30 a gallon, it was up 7 cents overnight, and diesel’s gotten to, what, $5.50, $5.60? That hits voters hard, all kinds of voters react to that – it’s a negative. How long are they going to stay at that level? Can you give us any idea when they will come down?”
Hassett admitted the situation was somewhat outside the Trump administration’s control.
“If you look at the situation in Iran, the Iranian economy is completely on the ropes,” he said. “They have hyperinflation, running out of food. A huge amount of feed that goes into their animals is imported through the [Persian] Gulf and having trouble getting through, and so there’s an enormous amount of pressure on Iran to open up [the Strait of Hormuz], and when they do, President Trump broke OPEC because the UAE left OPEC, and they had massive excess capacity, so as soon as we get the strait open, oil will flow like you’ve never seen before. So I think that futures markets expect prices to go down a lot, but I think they’re underestimating the effect of increased supply once the strait is open.”
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