From the “you can believe me or your lyin’ eyes” files:
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said the authors of a New York Fed study that found that Americans pay for tariffs should be disciplined, in an interview with CNBC Wednesday morning.
The findings of the paper run counter to what President Trump has claimed about his tariffs, and the attention the research has received has created a political problem for the White House. Trump wrote in the WSJ that the burden of tariffs “has fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S.”
That is not what the NY Fed study, out last week, concluded. Using government data, the authors found that U.S. importers of foreign goods paid 90% of the higher tariffs last year.They did this by looking at whether exporters lowered the prices of their goods, eating the costs of the tariffs, or if importers were paying more.
The boot-licking lackey Hassett has the nerve to say this:
“I mean, the paper is an embarrassment,” Hassett said on CNBC. “It’s, I think, the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system.”
Hassett argued that prices have gone down, wages are up, and “consumers were made better off by the tariffs.”
It’s clear that the word has gone forth in the Trump administration that their best hope for winning the midterms is to tell people that they don’t know their own minds. I’m sure it will work with the cult but that population seems to be shrinking not growing.
Traditional conservatives certainly aren’t buying it:
“I think the findings of the paper are consistent with what standard economic analysis would suggest,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, tells Axios. “The findings of the paper are also consistent with the empirical estimates of related papers,” he says. The problem is its conclusions run counter to the White House narrative.
Yes, that’s certainly true. But Trump has good reason to believe that if he just says something over and over again he can convince tens of millions of people to believe it regardless of the facts. It worked for him regarding the 2020 election and he even reversed many people’s beliefs about what they saw with their own eyes on January 6th. But this will be a real test of his limits. When it comes to their own wallets, people tend to go their own way no matter what the talking heads and politicians tell them. But who knows? Maybe Trump and his henchmen can pull this one off too.