Jared Bernstein

That is the most important thing you can do for working class people.

Because if the job market is tight, they have bargaining clout, bargaining power that they wouldn't otherwise have.

And they can thereby, I mean, unions are obviously important to him too.

But unions are a relatively small share of our workforce.

If you get the unemployment rate down below 4% and you hold it there, that's going to be fantastic for workers.

And that was absolutely the world he came up in.

And I believe he thought that if we have the jobs, if we have the tailwind of a strong job market behind us, economically, we should generally be pretty fine, and especially if growth is strong as well.

Of course, that thinking evolved over a period when the average inflation rate was between 1% and 2%.

And so when the pandemic came and you had the collision of constrained supply chains and strong demand, partly juiced by fiscal policy, I will admit that,

That led to an inflation we hadn't seen in 40 years.

And yeah, sure.

I mean, I think it's kind of acceptable.

I don't know, acceptable is the wrong word.

I think it's intellectually understandable that, you know, you might not be quite, have a 40-year problem in your worldview relative to one that has been, you know, really foundational, fundamental to your understanding through most of your career.

Inflation.

You said tariffs.

Yeah.

Without tariff policy, I think inflation by the end of this year, which we're now at the end of this year, would instead of being, I think the last seen, the core inflationary measures that the Fed looks at were closer to 3 than to 2.

I think they'd be a lot closer to 2 than to 3.

I think you'd be looking at inflation.