Why Hasn’t Biden Reversed Trump’s Tariffs to Fix Inflation?
Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama’s former economic advisers, explains why everyone hates Biden over the economy and what it’ll take to fix it.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Fifty-nine percent of Americans polled by Quinnipiac believe that President Joe Biden is not handling the economy well, which has left The New Abnormal host Molly Jong-Fast wondering what the hell is going on? Why are so many people pissed at Biden?
Economist Austan Goolsbee, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, came on the show for this bonus episode to help make sense of the sentiment—and explain how we fix it.
“I think part of what happened is the economic polling always comes in with a lag,” he explains. “It doesn’t reflect what happened this week. It reflects how people have been feeling for the last two or three months. And over the summer coming into the fall, it was disappointing.”
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And the inflation happening in the first place is the result of a perfect storm, he adds: “We are acting completely different than we ever have acted before, which is to say we’re spending way more of our income on physical things than we really ever do. When the demand for physical stuff is higher than it’s ever been, and all the countries of the world are trying to buy physical stuff all at exactly the same time—the system is not prepared to handle that.”
So how do we fix it? Surprisingly, Goolsbee suggests an old Trumpian ghost: his tariffs.
“I look at the Trump tariffs, that was probably the biggest tax increase on the middle class in the modern political history of the United States. The average family paid several thousand dollars more in taxes because of those tariffs. So I think it was a mistake,” he says. “[Eliminating them] is not really going to relieve the supply chain pressures that we talked about, but it would affect prices.”
Plus! He explains how the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, otherwise known as OPEC, is run like a cartel and why subsidizing green energy like oil all comes back to Joe Manchin.
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