Catherine Rampell
speaker
759 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Catherine Rampell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is not an isolated example. There are so many industries, business owners, employees who are dealing with this new reality, these new constraints. Trump said China was going to pay the tariff, and that's wrong, right? China will still be hurt, to be clear. China will still be hurt, as will our trading partners.
Because even if, let's say, 100% of the tariff cost gets passed along to American consumers, and I don't think it's going to be quite that, but just for the sake of argument, let's say it's entirely paid by American consumers.
American consumers will respond to those higher prices by buying less stuff, buying fewer of those special needs toys, fewer cars, fewer appliances, maybe fewer healthy groceries, produce, things like that that get tariffed, coffee, vanilla, whatever. Right. People will buy less stuff. And so that will hurt our trading partners.
That will hurt everybody else in the supply chain, the retailers and wholesalers who also depend on bringing in those imports and then ultimately selling them to consumers. So it is true that other countries will be hurt, but so will Americans, the consumers and the businesses out there, whether they're selling toys or anything else.
And Kevin Hassett, who is the National Economic Council director.
He went on TV this weekend and I was like screaming at the TV because he said, if you say that it's really only Americans who are paying the cost of the tariffs, why is our phone ringing off the hook from all of these other countries? Clearly, they must be paying the cost of the tariff and will be fine if they're the ones trying to make a deal and negotiate. And it's like, no, you idiot.
How did you get a PhD in economics and never learn about this thing called deadweight loss? It's like when the price goes up. Yeah, somebody's going to absorb the price, but also the quantity of stuff sold goes down, and that's basically going to hurt everybody. That's going to hurt the sellers, whether it's a foreign manufacturer or whatever, foreign supplier.
It's going to hurt the retailers, the wholesalers, and it's going to hurt the consumers. So it's just like he knows better. The people who annoy me most in this administration are less the people who are just like... Complete ignoramuses and liars and, like, just don't even bother learning the truth. And more so the people who really know better.
They don't even need a PhD to know the answer to this question. They needed to have taken what you took. You said you took, like, introductory macro or whatever. Like, this is not hard to understand. Besant, Hassett, people like that, I just... They are the worst enablers, I think, because... Trump, I'm sure, surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear, and that's bad enough.
But then some of these people seem like they have some credibility because they're a PhD economist or because they were a Wall Street titan that markets trust. And when they go on TV and lie about the economics here, I think that is so much more destructive than because it encourages Trump to keep on doing the stupid, stupid, stupid thing.
And it hurts any credibility they might ultimately have with markets who can see through this clearly. And as things get worse, we will need someone to go on TV and present a credible plan, I hope, for how to get ourselves out of this. And there's just no one left to trust.
Yes. So the word Orwellian gets overused a lot. Everybody and their grandmother has been called Orwellian at some point. But there's this famous line in 1984 that actually George Orwell had used versions of elsewhere as well, where he said something like it would get to the point where if the party said two plus two equals five, you would just have to believe it was so. And that is...
quite close, if not exactly what Senate Republicans just did. Historically, what has happened is they get to say, okay, our bill can lose this much money because it's always losing money, at least when we're talking about tax cuts. Our bill can lose X amount of money and
And then the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, these sort of neutral referees get to say, okay, does it actually meet that or not? And then there's this person called the Senate Parliamentarian. It's like all of these trappings of... Whatever Senate procedure Senate parliamentarian gets to say your number equals their number or it doesn't.
And if it doesn't, it's much harder to pass the bill effectively. Right. Like if the things match, then they only need a majority vote. And Democrats have no way to kill the bill. That's why they're doing this special process so that they can now have a majority vote, can't be filibustered, et cetera. That is how it normally works.
What Lindsey Graham, who is the Senate budget chair, has said is, nope, none of that matters. I get to decide how the math works. And I am deciding that tax cuts that we passed before and are set to expire, if we re-up them, they will be free. And that's it, right? Two plus two equals five. Or in this particular arithmetic, $4 trillion equals zero. That's what's happening here.
It's a fancy way of saying Republicans... get to control the law's arithmetic. They get to rewrite the math and the normal checks and balances, you know, just looking at like in the spreadsheet, does this thing equal this thing? None of that matters anymore. So that's like the overarching takeaway that I would have on this, that they are just, it's truly Orwellian.
They get to decide how arithmetic works. The specific thing that they're doing, which is what you were talking about with saying like, well, the old tax cuts are free. To help people understand this, why it makes no sense is it's like if you had a car lease and the lease ended, that's like saying the next lease won't cost anything because I got really used to having a car.
Even though, of course, the new lease will cost you something every month. But that's basically what they're doing with tax cuts. They're saying, we got used to having the tax cuts. If we have another round of tax cuts at the same levels, that won't cost anything. I think that the bigger long-term problem is they are now setting a precedent where
they get to decide, the majority gets to decide effectively how math works. That's alarming. There are a whole bunch of reasons why this is interesting, but including that, of course, Republicans and some Democrats were like apoplectic about the idea of ruining or ending other Senate norms, like ending the filibuster and things like that. And these are all related.
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