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Chapter 1: What does JD Vance's criticism of Trump reveal about the economy?
Donald Trump was thrown under the bus by his own vice president, J.D. Vance, who shined a massive spotlight on just how disastrous Donald Trump's presidency is. So J.D.
Vance took a tour across the country this past week, purportedly to defend Donald Trump's economic policies that are an utter disaster, to defend Donald Trump sending ICE and Border Patrol Gestapo to terrorize people in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and across this country.
And then JD Vance took part in a March for Life event where he talked about completely banning women's access to reproductive rights. And it just made the country even more livid and pissed at Donald Trump and JD Vance than they already were. Heck, even Laura Loomer, one of Donald Trump's biggest cheerleaders, said, why is the GOP and J.D.
Vance pushing more abortion messaging in a midterm election year? Didn't they learn their lesson from 2018? Trump doesn't like when the GOP focuses on abortion. How many times does have to say this, Trump gets it, the GOP will blow the midterms, to which J.D.
Vance responds, the president literally sent a video to the March for Life today and encouraged me to accept their invitation, which I was happy to do. And then Laura Loomer kept on attacking J.D. Vance and all of these other MAGA people kept attacking J.D. Vance. But earlier in the week, J.D. Vance visited Toledo, Ohio and then Minneapolis. When he was in Toledo,
His message on the economy is, the economy is just like the Titanic, J.D. Vance said. Hmm, I wonder what happened with the Titanic, J.D. J.D. says you can't just turn around the Titanic overnight. So I got it, J.D. The American economy is like the Titanic. That's your messaging going into the midterm. Watch J.D. throw Donald Trump under the bus right here. Let's play this clip.
This is something I want you to hear. The Democrats talk a lot about the affordability crisis in the United States of America. And yes, there is an affordability crisis, one created by Joe Biden's policies. You don't turn the Titanic around overnight. It takes time to fix what was broken. I said earlier that the...
And then when JD was speaking at the March for Life event, as it's called, JD Vance kind of repeated that message and said, the elephant in the room is that many of you think we're not doing things quick enough. Watch JD say that here as well, play this clip.
Now I must address an elephant in the room and I've heard the guy over here talking about it.
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Chapter 2: How does JD Vance compare the economy to the Titanic?
Watch Troy's response. It's so utterly embarrassing. Play this clip.
Donald Trump said that he would lower the cost of energy by 50% in his first 12 months. What was your message for Americans who are seeing their energy prices go up?
well energy i mean there are several things of energy you got energy got gas and everything gas prices are down other things are down but we have a very unstable the entire globe there's a lot of instability obviously with venezuela with oil this and that there's a lot of fluctuations with all that so i think donald trump just give him time give that man time to continue to lead.
And if Congress will follow that lead, you will see energy prices reduced by 50%. There's no question about it, because Donald Trump is right all the time.
But on the topic, of the disastrous Trump economy, and not just the short-term damage, but the long-term damage it is causing, I want to bring in someone that I admire and someone who I'm sure you admire as well, Justin Wolfers. professor over at University of Michigan, professor of economics. Let's bring in Professor Wolfers.
I want to have a conversation with him about Donald Trump's disastrous economy and how we should be thinking about this right now as well. Let's bring in Professor Wolfers. Professor Wolfers, great to see you.
Mate, I'll go by Justin. Good to see you, Ben. Justin, great to see you. Unless you want to go by Professor, how do I pronounce it? Micellus.
Micellus. It just depends how I'm feeling. I prefer to go by Ben, though. But Justin, let's get into it. So this past week, we saw yet another kind of fake deal announced by Donald Trump. He goes to Davos. He confuses Greenland with Iceland. He says we need to acquire it. Later on in the day, he announces, we've done this great deal and we did it with NATO.
Apparently Denmark, Greenland, or Mark Rudd of NATO don't know anything about it. Trump says, it's infinite. It's amazing. It's so great. You learn that nobody knows any details of this thing. There's no deal at all. He made it all up. The market tanks, the market rises. We've seen this pattern before. You've documented. Let's just start this week and then we'll pan out a little bit.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Justin Wolfers provide on Trump's economic policies?
So what he managed to do was cause a stock market sell-off as the world reacted to the possibility that the next round of the trade war was starting. And then he managed to cause markets to rise by just not doing that. And if I sound a little exhausted now, I am. And if your audience is feeling sick and tired of this carnival show, you ought to be.
Sometimes, though, I think we're going to learn the most if we press pause, stand back, and try and put everything that we just talked about in a deeper perspective. I'm going to let you guide me on that, Ben.
Let's do that because the cycle that we've seen now for over a year, I think the first threat was against Colombia, and then he backed down. People forget it. I think it was actually Colombia over a year ago. Then it was Canada and Mexico. then he did it with China, and then you had what he called Liberation Day, which was liquidation day, the markets tanked there.
Then he would just kind of oscillate with that over and over again, and you see that same pattern, and he'd pick on kind of random countries. The biggest drop was after Liberation, Liquidation Day, And while we could talk about the difference here, sometimes people call it like a K-shaped economy because the rich get richer, everybody else gets screwed.
And while the markets have gone frantic, but have trended at least to help wealthier people, the impacts have been felt. The tariffs have been felt by consumers. There's some people are saying it's either a jobless recession, but unemployment is up and people are struggling to find jobs. Things are far more expensive.
People struggle to pay their rent, you know, and you have this, you know, Trump points to the markets, the markets, the markets,
and the people are saying what about me i'm left behind in all of this and and and there is that that k-shaped element can you talk us through that so much there um let me trying to figure which part of that to start by biting off um the let me tell you the distinguishing feature of this business cycle
Normally, the economy churns along and some good things are happening and some bad things are happening. Some sectors are expanding, some are contracting, and that's what a normal economy looks like. And sometimes we have recessions and that's usually because something bad and unexpected happens.
There's a financial crisis, there's a global pandemic, there's a war, there's big movements in global oil markets. What's so annoying, frustrating, disappointing, and different about this is this might be the first ever economic downturn caused by incompetence.
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Chapter 4: How does consumer sentiment reflect the current economic situation?
If it's true, it's a mere accident. So that means if something comes out of the president's mouth, it's almost certainly untrue. If it comes out of the Treasury Secretary's mouth, it may well be untrue. If it comes out of the Commerce Secretary's mouth, just go and run away and stop listening to him. If it comes out of the Press Secretary's mouth, she's a relentless liar.
So anyone inside the White House, just forget it.
separately there's our economic statistics our economic statistics are compiled by independent or independent-ish agencies the bureau of labor statistics bureau of economic analysis and census bureau these are totally serious statisticians who are doing the best they can with the resources they can nothing that comes out of those organizations is a lie still okay and i think it's really important as much as we might worry about the statistics none of it's a political lie having said that
that doesn't mean they're always the truth, which is to say any statistic is an estimate. It's a best guess using a specific methodology. And at different times and places, those methodologies can be stronger or weaker.
We never know the truth because in order to know, for instance, the truth of total income earned in America, we'd have to talk to every American and find out how much income they've earned. We don't do that, right? We have to ask people, did we ask the right subset? Did they tell the truth? Were they thinking about pre-tax or post-tax? All sorts of things go on.
Statistical sausage is really quite complex. So even though these numbers are the truth, they are open to critique. Now, here's where I really want to be careful. They're almost always, because we're blessed by extraordinarily good statisticians in the United States, they're almost always the best possible guess.
So you might have other ways of guessing, estimating what's going on, but these guys are very, very sophisticated. So they're almost always the best, but the best doesn't mean perfect. And to give you a An example, we estimate non-farm payrolls. It makes big headlines once a month. It's one of the most important economic indicators.
The way they do that is they call a bunch of companies and they say, how many people are you hiring right now? Now, you might think, well, that's pretty easy. How could that go wrong? Well, the question is, when they call, say, 1,000 companies, did they just call one 1,000th of all companies in the United States or one 2,000th?
In order to know that, you'd have to know how many companies there were. And the problem with that is every day there are new companies being born and there's old companies dying and they never report to the government exactly what it is they're doing.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of a jobs recession?
They thought of economics just as economics. And what's happened is we've become increasingly partisan over time. And you can basically date this to the day that Trump walked down the golden escalator. We start to see everything through a partisan lens now. And so what happens now is you call someone and you ask them, how do you feel about the state of the economy?
And often what they do instead is they answer the question, how do you feel about the present? And so Democrats say, I feel like it's in a terrible recession. And Republicans say, I think it's booming extraordinarily.
And so the correlation between people's feelings about the economy and their partisan views has become incredibly strong, perhaps so strong that we're not learning anything about their views about the economy. Here's the other thing. During good economic times, you might expect 80% of people to be confident about the economy.
But if we've got a sample that's half Democrat and half Republican, and half the Republicans think it's terrible and half the Democrats think it's wonderful, then we're going to end up with 50% saying that they think it's a good economy. And so this could actually be what's pushing consumer confidence down.
The measurements are all honest, but they no longer mean the same thing that we thought that they once mean. Now, Ben, I hope I've impressed you with my capacity to bore you.
Well, let me ask you about your... You've always impressed me with that. But let me ask you more broadly, though, about your view on the economy right now. Because certain factors, whether it's manufacturing, it seemed that we were... the envy of the world, as it was described heading into the Trump administration.
And now it seems at least in manufacturing, I've heard manufacturing recession, or at least manufacturing down. When it comes to unemployment, people saying we've got a big issue with jobs right now. And I've heard the term jobs recession being thrown around. I don't want to throw out the R word recession haphazardly on the show, but I hear economists using that term.
But recession, I know, is also a specific term of art as it relates to overall economic GDP style growth. What do you feel about the economy right now? Where are we right now? Certainly, I've seen your posts relative to the rest of the world. Actually, America is doing much worse. We're not leading the world anymore, even if there is some growth in areas.
But what do you think, Professor, about where we are now?
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Chapter 6: How do partisan views affect perceptions of the economy?
There were some entrepreneurs who couldn't afford to go to business school. There were immigrants with great ideas who ended up staying in their home countries instead. And so whatever the next generation's Google or open AI is,
it may not end up being invented or it may not happen on our soil and we will never see that absence but our kids will feel it our kids will feel it instead of lost opportunities they'll be
businesses they never started, there'll be job opportunities, there'll be new technologies, there'll be ways of creating a greener, safer, more prosperous future that simply aren't possible, but we're not going to see it straight away.
And that I think is our current media is not well set up to talk about those issues because there's no number comes out, there's no news cycle, there's no Wall Street Journal headline, but it turns out economic research tells us that's the stuff that matters.
We want to focus on that more. I hope you come back where we'll just zoom in right on that topic in specific, and that's where we'll start. But I think this was a good foundation for what I hope will be a number of other conversations we can have, because with our 6 million subscribers here and more people watching this YouTube channel more than the networks,
Yours is a voice I want to share and I want to talk about those topics. I'm impressed by, as you said, the ability to bore because that's what people like about me. And it's the ability to get into the detail. People like when we go into the footnotes.
I will share with our audience. Ben and I had never met before 15 minutes ago, but Ben, I have a feeling we're going to be mates.
All right, Professor Wolfers. Justin, Justin, everybody. Thanks, Justin. Take care. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, ad-free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.
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