Justin Wolfers Discusses Trump’s Damage to US Economy

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3:17Ben Meiselas:Then fire up the grill with no antibiotics ever, proteins and fresh produce. Savor the season. Shop Summer Fruit Fest at Whole Foods Market. Rupert Murdoch issuing stark warnings to Donald Trump, both about his catastrophic war in Iran, as well as Donald Trump's disastrous economic policies. And we've seen Murdoch using his op-eds to kind of escalate this against Donald Trump or to put out messages in certain areas. And then you have Donald Trump's former VP, Mike Pence, also reposting the Murdoch articles. I mean, this is what the Wall Street Journal op-ed editorial board writes about Trump's economic policies, how Trump's tariffs really work.

4:03Ben Meiselas:He hails Toyota's investments, but what about the higher costs and manufacturing job losses? And this is Pence quoting the op-ed of Wall Street Journal. The president is right that his tariffs are at work. Yeah. In destroying U.S. jobs and raising prices, the U.S. has lost some 75 ,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025, including 25 ,900 in motor vehicle and parts production. separately in international affairs, on a lot of state regime media, which calls itself Fox reports, they're out there saying, why the hell do we have Steve Whitcoff and Jared Kushner acting like they're envoys to the United States and that they don't know what they're doing.

4:52Ben Meiselas:They're corrupt real estate people or investment people, and they know nothing about diplomacy. And you've seen that escalate as well. Now, of course, you know, on other Murdoch properties and shows, they might as well be worse than Kim Jong-un propaganda media. But it does say something to me that they are striking kind of at both areas. I mean, international affairs and then on the economic front. And when Donald Trump's out there saying, I've created so many jobs, we're in a golden age. We all know that's not true. I want to bring in Justin Wolfers, launched Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers on YouTube.

5:30Ben Meiselas:And we'll talk about this at the end briefly. Justin and I are going to have a really big announcement next week. It may be related to Midas Touch of Platypus, but we will see. Justin, it's great to see you. You're seeing this on the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, but then there are other Fox shows that will kind of give the Kim Jong-un dear leader, doesn't make any mistake. What do you make of this moment? Because it does seem we're in kind of just, you know, sleepwalking. We're not, but like kind of sleepwalking into this massive economic crisis generationally. Yeah, actually, I think the generational part is a really big part and it's the part that we're not hearing enough about.

6:11But, you know, let's come back. What is it the Wall Street Journal is saying? It's actually saying something that every economist with a pulse is saying, which is that the trade war hasn't helped. There's sort of two ways of thinking about this, Ben. One would be could tariffs plausibly help? And then another is what about the way they've done it? So, you know, I don't think these tariffs have helped. Let me start there. For instance, if you put a 50 % tariff on steel and aluminium, oh, I'm in America, aluminium, that raises the costs of any factory that uses steel and aluminium but only of American factories.

6:50If you're up in Canada, if you're in China, you don't have to pay US tariffs in order to get the raw materials you need to make the stuff that you need. This is very straightforward. So look, page one of the tariff handbook says don't tariff inputs. And the president has done that egregiously and repeatedly. There might be a day when someone somewhere can convince me that, you know, national defense says we need this form of tariff or that. But that's not what we've got. And that gets to the second point. even if you can make the case for some of these tariffs the way they've done it the on again off again nature of the tariffs the um we've got people in canada who are not going to import wine from the united states in fact all of canada basically they're all elbows up why is that because the president said he'd invade canada and people take that very seriously from the perspective of americans we gain nothing and then we lost trade with canada so that hurt and it's this um this This idea that there's, it's not just that we have tariffs, we have uniquely incompetent tariffs.

7:52Never in the history of American trade policy have we had tariffs change as frequently. Never have they been as poorly thought out. Never have they been as easily negotiated one-on-one with the White House. And so I'm not at all surprised to see the Wall Street Journal come out vehemently against this. It's very hard to be conservative and to be pro-tariff. In fact, it's quite funny. Sometimes I get TV producers who call me and they say, I want someone who's not an idiot to defend Trump's tariffs. And if they could only find that person, that person will be on TV all day, every day.

8:28Ben Meiselas:I want to talk about the generational piece. You and I spoke about six months ago. We spoke other times too, but this is where you challenged our audience and you told people, I want you to think more in terms of the scope and damage that Trump is doing, not just in a year or a few years, but in decades to come. And that's how economists map this out as well. Sure, there is the short-term pain, and it's really making people suffer, compounding on a daily basis. But I know in this dystopian reality TV show presidency, the arc that Donald Trump likes to have to his various schemes often start and end in single days.

9:17Ben Meiselas:And he makes up these fictitious, they called me, we're good, We're off, we're on, we're off, we're on, we're on. You know, and then he brings in the new days kind of events. But the damage that is being caused to the United States, to the stability, to be, you know, to the dollar, to our markets, to, you know, the systemic shield that once made the United States this great place for investment, that that is being eroded. And sure, the problem with the liquidation or Trump's Liberation Day against the world, that may not show up in May, like, oh, my God. But guess what? It does start to show up as you start looking in 2026 and 2027.

10:01Ben Meiselas:And you start to see that inflation chart. And you start to see all these charts look exactly like the economists were saying. But what you had to fight, and I want to hear from you against, is everybody saying, look, these economists were wrong because three weeks after it, it didn't happen like all of a sudden cause and effect. Talk to us about that, Jessica. Yeah. Look, the most important factor in economics is something that too much of the business media misses, which is what really matters is how much are we growing decade to decade rather than are we going to have a recession tomorrow and the ups and downs in June versus July versus August, right?

10:37You'll see any number of clips on next month, next quarter. I get very few people who want to talk to me about next year. But actually what really matters is next decade and the decade after that. And I really do want folks at home to just think hard and internalize that this is not a political statement. It's an economic statement. And I want to give you a way, let me tell you a story that gives you a way of trying to hold these ideas central. Go back 150 years and look around the world at what were the world's richest countries and I want to point to two of them. One of them was Argentina, which like, and the other was, let's talk about the United States.

11:14Both of these were intensely resource rich countries among the very richest countries in the world. And if you and I went back to 1850 and we were placing bets on which country was going to be successful over the next one or two centuries, you know, you might've made a pretty good case it would be Argentina. But what happened following that was sort of a deep undermining of the institutions that are the foundations of economic growth, an undermining of democracy, various shifts towards autocracy. And, you know, Argentina turned out to be an awful melodrama. And 150 years later, Argentina is a middle income country and the United States is enormously richer.

11:57And so I feel enormous gratitude that we developed a set of market institutions, a set of legal institutions, a set of democratic institutions that more or less say if you want to succeed in America, the way to do it is to, you know, help us build a bigger pie. And the problem when you don't have the rule of law and you have autocracy and you have corruption is the way to get ahead is to steal the next bloke's slice of pie instead. And once you see this difference between Argentina and the United States over the last one or 200 years, you can't unsee it. And this lesson that what you want is an economy where the incentive is to grow the pie, you know, invent a new iPhone, the next technology versus steal another bloke, slice the pie.

12:44And that's the point at which you suddenly look at our current moment and you gasp. at a cultural level. This is a White House that feels like there's a lot of stealing pie going on. There's a level of corruption that I think is utterly staggering. There's a sense of crony capitalism where the way for businesses to get ahead today is not to invent a better product but instead to be first in line at Mar-a-Lago or for a country to get ahead is not to be a more reliable ally but to donate a modestly good jet that sometimes works. And so those are really the foundations of our prosperity. And if you think that we're at a moment now, think of it as a point of inflection.

13:28I don't think we're too far down the road. I'm actually still an optimist, but we might be at a point of inflection where one path sends us down the Argentinian road and the other sends us to the American road. And once you understand that, you realize how meaningless many of the day-to-day debates that we have are, you know, was gross domestic product up last quarter, next quarter. It's that we won't develop in the ways in which we ought to. And so what we'll see in the future, it's not that we'll see something, it's there'll be an absence, there'll be inventions that don't occur, there'll be forms of leadership that the US simply doesn't demonstrate.

14:06And as a result, there'll be fewer opportunities for our kids.

14:09Ben Meiselas:You know, Justin, though, when we look at the charts, though, from, you know, even the snapshot from April to right now, and looking where these charts, whether you look at jobs, you know, as stated in the Wall Street Journal article, whether you look at inflation, which continues to, you know, look, it's not going up month over month at 1 % or 1.5%, but it is going up month over month, 0.3, 0.2, 0.4. That all then continues to add up. And then you look back at it and you're like, we're approaching 5 % year over. I mean, year over year, we're looking like 5, 5.2. And then what seems to happen though, is we hit these markers.

14:57Ben Meiselas:You'll get the report though, that then comes in that day. and then on corporate media or whatever, it hits like, oh my God, where'd this number come from? It was like, right there. It's been going that direction. That number shouldn't come, like, yes, four is a round number. So that was like a big one. Five is a round number, but it's clearly heading in that direction. So how do you kind of process that before we go? Yeah. I think you're asking me a meta question there, Ben, and I love that because I never get ask meta questions. And it gets to what I like to do, which is I like to teach the world economics.

15:32And so for folks at home, you're going to be ingesting all of this news. And I want you, first of all, to understand that no economist is particularly upset that last month's number was a little bit up or a little bit down. Our deepest sense of the world is that the economy tends to move somewhat smoothly. And what happens is data are noisy. And so we're sailing through fog and every now and then we get a glimpse of the future, but you can't tell whether what you just saw was an odd shaped cloud or a real storm cloud on the horizon. And so you've got to slowly adjust as new information comes in.

16:07And so often you'll see news anchors are the most excited by the news and economists are the least excited because we're just trying to guide and navigate at a sort of slower rate. And I think the most important skill I want, I certainly use with my students home for and I hope people at home can take seriously is to think about the bigger picture, step back, remember the story of our economy is not a story of weeks and months. It's a story of years and decades. And what are we seeing and how does this change that bigger picture? It will never be quite as dramatic as, you know, a 29-year-old TV producer might want it to be, but you'll have a deeper sense of it.

16:46And I think this is your point, Ben. You'll then be able to really spot what the dangers are if you're panning back away from the statistical noise to the underlying reality of the economy.

16:57Ben Meiselas:I want everybody to go and subscribe to Platypus Economics as soon as this video is over. That's Justin's YouTube page, and he's building that out to really make economics accessible and interesting. And it's such an important topic. And you've all seen Justin on the various news networks. And I will say this, Justin and I have a big announcement coming up early next week on Monday. Secret, but it may involve more of me and Justin together. It might, but it might not. No one knows. That's the mystery of it all. Exactly. Everybody go check out Platypus and go subscribe to our channel here as well.

17:38Ben Meiselas:Let's get to 7 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.