Talking about economic uncertainty due to the continued tariff related fruit basket upset, Kevin Hasset told CNBC that things will clear up after April 2nd. This is the same Kevin Hasset who has been repeatedly and outrageously wrong. In 1999 he predicted that stocks were undervalued just before the dot-com bubble burst. In 2013 he accused Obama of trying to deliberately sabotage the economy. And in April 2020 Hassett was clamoring for “reopening” and predicted covid deaths would peak by mid April 2020 and that everything would be back to normal by May 2020. In May 2020, when things were most certainly not back to normal, Kevin Hasset still insisted what he said “our human capital stock is ready to get back to work” and pretty much disgusted everyone with his callous dehumanization of American workers. And last I heard he was in charge of managing bird flu.
Who would really listen to this guy for anything at this point? The only thing that’s certain is that so many job losses in the federal government and because of loss of federal funding or uncertainty around federal funding, just can’t be good for the stability of the economy, and that’s before you get to the tariffs, the bird flu, and the regulatory chaos and loss of regulatory oversight that will likely lead to massive financial and market misbehaviors. And one doesn’t need to be an economist to know that there’s been evidence that Trump and Elon Musk actually want things to crash and burn.
My letter to reps:
I don’t trust the Trump administration economic officials like Kevin Hasset who has been repeatedly wrong in his predictions over the years. It seems pretty obvious to me that tariffs, along with all these job losses because of federal workforce firings, and with the people I’m hearing about losing jobs or unable to find jobs because of uncertain funding in scientific research, and the regulatory uncertainty or absence – that this has to have a negative effect on the economy. The uncertainty and pretty much chaos alone is likely to cause problems. What are you planning to do to mitigate the problems that seem likely to come from all this?
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.