Kevin Hassett

So that gets you up to three before you do something to labor.

And so you're looking at pretty good growth accounting right now that easily could be looking at a sequence of years that are from three to even four because of the productivity, if the productivity stays where it is, which I think it will.

That's an easy question.

How is that related to Fed independence?

First of all, I think the idea that government service makes it less likely that you'll pursue an independent Fed basically rejects the evidence of the five Council of Economic Advisers chairs that went on to be independent Fed people.

And so I think it's a very common path for people who have worked in the White House to go on and to work well at the Fed and to do so independently.

I have been critical of the policies of the current Fed because I think they haven't been data-driven enough.

And I think that the way you convince your colleagues is that you

make sure that you're using models that make sense and forecasts that make sense and that you have a strong argument for, say, productivity, producing growth that doesn't cause inflation, and then you really have to be convincing with the economics.

And the thing about independents is

that I just want to tell a little story about it that shows how much it's really important.

There's a big literature that says that if the Fed loses its independence, then inflation expectations become unmoored.

And so you can't let the Fed lose its independence and

The story is one that goes back to the 90s that you and I were talking about with me and Chairman Greenspan.

That one of the first papers that I wrote when I was on leave from Columbia and working at the Fed was with my colleague, Jim Metcalf, who was at Princeton at the time.

And we, President Clinton had run on having a BTU tax, if people are old enough to know.

And the BTU tax was one of his main things that he and Al Gore, because they were way ahead of the curve on climate,

And so given our public finance economists, we wanted to know, well, what does a BTU tax do?

How does it work?

How to model it and stuff?