Justin Wolfers

The president's not accountable for everything.

Sometimes economies have lives of their own.

That's not a story that any economist is telling right now.

So there's the immense uncertainty that people feel.

Now, we all feel it in very different ways.

If you're running a business right now, you don't know what the rules are going to be tomorrow.

You don't know whether you'll be able to import

The goods that you need as inputs.

You don't know whether you'll be able to find foreign markets for the goods that you're producing.

You don't know whether the workers you've been relying on are going to be there tomorrow.

You don't know, for instance, I teach at a university, whether we'll be able to get our students in across the border.

And if they can't get across the border, we can't take their tuition.

You don't know whether your company is going to get called out in the late night Truth Social post for being too woke, not woke enough.

You don't know whether you're going to end up the way the CEO of Intel did, of walking into the White House for a meeting and walking out having accidentally left 10% of his company down the back of the White House couch.

You don't know what the rules and regulations are going to be tomorrow.

You don't know who's even going to be staffing the government departments that you have to work with.

And so there's this just immense uncertainty out there.

But uncertainty is one thing.

We can even live with that.

But the problem is often the choices, often when we say, well, here's something that's happening, I can think to myself, well, a rational government would do this, and this will give me a way of thinking about the future.