Biden’s Econ Adviser Insists President Is ‘As Sharp As Ever’ As MSNBC Host Relays Concerns
'He is always asking exactly the right questions'
Since Biden Inherited The Trump Boom, The Whole Economy’s Gone Bust
Now that the easy-growth environment of the post-Covid era is well behind us, Biden — and the country — face a terrible economic reckoning.Biden’s Economics Adviser Tacitly Admits He Doesn’t Understand Economics
While the Fed is cleaning up some of the messes it made by printing money for the better part of the past 15 years, people on the Left want to make those messes even worse.The White House’s Black Friday Spin Can’t Blind Voters To Our Bad Economy
No amount of trickery by the Biden administration, Big Tech, or bozos in the media will convince Americans that their wallets are safe.CNBC anchor gets frank with Biden's top economic adviser about the truth on 'Bidenomics': 'It's not working'
CNBC anchor Joe Kernen confronted a top Biden adviser on Tuesday over the administration's failing "Bidenomics" message.
The president's top economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, went on "Squawk Box" and painted a rosy picture about the economy. He claimed that "Bidenomics in action is helping, it's working, it's helping to build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out."
It's good rhetoric, no doubt. But Kernen was not buying it.
Kernen pointed to stories in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post detailing Biden's economic woes. Specifically, he brought attention to Biden's falsehood that he has cut the deficit "when, in fact, it's going to be $2 trillion — double last year — and the cuts that he did make are based on cutting from the pandemic level."
"So, it's kind of disingenuous," Kernen declared. "All that taken together, it leaves a very sour case in most people's mouths."
Kernen even took issue with Bernstein specifically, who, according to the CNBC host, likes to claim that Americans are "more optimistic" about the economy if you ask them individually.
"But," Kernen countered, "only one-third consistently of Americans buy into your contention that Bidenomics is working. So maybe you need to come on every day because it's not working, your message."
In response, Bernstein claimed he is not "discounting" poll data, but said they only show American sentiment from "30 or 40,000 feet up."
Meanwhile, Bernstein listed only two metrics to support his claim: that Americans support Biden's intervention on pharmaceuticals and they support providing manufacturing companies tax incentives to create more jobs, a rather risk-free policy that most Americans would support, no matter who implemented it.
"So, I think it's an inaccurate narrative to declare that somehow Bidenomics isn't working or that it's not favorably received by people when you drill down into what it actually is," he contended.
Notably, Bernstein did not provide data on inflation, wages, employment data, the deficit, or any other meaningful economic metric to support his claim. On the other hand, the latest Wall Street Journal poll definitively showed that Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of the economy.
An inaccurate narrative to declare Bidenomics not working: CEA Chair Jared Bernstein youtu.be
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CNBC host calls out 'disingenuous' narrative pushed by Biden admin on student loan debt forgiveness plan
CNBC host Joe Kernan condemned the "disingenuous" narrative the Biden administration is using when asked how it will pay for President Joe Biden's student loan debt forgiveness plan.
What is the Biden administration saying?
Officials have been repeatedly asked how they will pay for the plan, which the White House says will cost $240 billion over 10 years but which nonpartisan analyses say will cost at least $500 billion.
To pay for it, officials have said record deficit reduction, which they attribute to Biden, will cover the cost.
What happened on CNBC?
Kernan confronted Jared Bernstein, a top Biden economic adviser, on "Squawk Box" Wednesday over the assertion that deficit reduction will foot the bill.
"To say that we’ve got deficit reduction in place and therefore somehow that’s gonna cover the $500 billion that we’re spending on student loan replacement. Just because we’re no longer in emergency-spending mode from the COVID years, to take credit for lowering the deficit by $1 trillion because we’re no longer spending it on these emergencies and saying, 'Therefore we somehow got this slush fund of $1.2 billion to work with,' that is disingenuous and we haven’t heard anything better from the Biden administration on where you’re gonna pay for this," Kernan confronted.
In response, Bernstein claimed that student loan debt forgiveness "spending is far outweighed by the amount of deficit reduction."
"It's very simple point just saying, basically, $1.7 trillion is a lot bigger than $240 billion, the latter being the cost of the debt forgiveness program," Bernstein said.
Bernstein also claimed that budget deficit reduction is only partly attributed to dissipated pandemic-related spending.
However, the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated budget deficit reduction will be $1.7 trillion, attributed the reduction to waning pandemic-related spending.
From the CBO:
CBO projects that the federal budget deficit will shrink to $1.0 trillion in 2022 (it was $2.8 trillion last year) and that the annual shortfall would average $1.6 trillion from 2023 to 2032. The deficit continues to decrease as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) next year as spending related to the coronavirus pandemic wanes ...
Regarding the inflationary impacts of Biden's plan — which have been emphasized by Democratic economists like Larry Summers and Jason Furman — Bernstein claimed that ending the student loan payment moratorium in January is a "cooling force" that offsets the inflationary impacts.
Toward the end of the interview, Kernan asked whether the political cost of the plan is worth it for Democrats.
"Just to mollify or appease the far-left progressives and maybe get a few votes, do you really think that it’s worth it politically to have done this?" Kernan asked.
Bernstein, of course, defended the plan as helping people "who really need some help."
Kernan rebutted that Biden's plan forces blue-collar workers to pay for debt some Americans incurred to attend Ivy League schools. Bernstein claimed this is false.
However, Biden's plan does not place limitations on where someone went to school. As long as they earn less than $125,000 per year, they qualify for debt forgiveness. So yes, taxpayer money will pay for Americans who have debt from their Ivy League educations.
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