U.S. Budget and Economy

On August 9, 2026, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett appeared on State of the Union with Jake Tapper. Following is an excerpt of their conversation taken from the transcript : TAPPER: There have been job losses for six out of the 18 full months of President Trump's second term. That's a third of them. And the Trump administration has only added 548,000 net jobs so far, which is considered very slow growth. It's growth, but very slow. Two million jobs were created in the last 18 months of Biden's presidency. Are you really arguing that your numbers are better than that? HASSETT: Well, I disagree with your number. We will have to follow up on e-mail, but I just looked at the latest number. It was that job creation under President Trump since January 20 is about 880,000 jobs. But we won't argue about 800 or 500 factually on a show right now. But the fact is that the thing that really jumps out at us is that those are really good jobs. They're manufac...

As the transcript at https://abcnews.com/Politics/week-transcript-5-31-26-white-house-national/story?id=133455615 shows, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett continues to make misleading statements on the Sunday news shows to defend Trump's economic record. Regarding inflation, Jonathan Karl asked him the following question on This Week With George Stephanopoulos on March 31, 2026: Well, I mean, recounting what I'm hearing and what a lot of people are hearing. But let me ask you about inflation, because we had the Bureau of Economic Analysis came out this week -- this is the Fed’s go-to gauge for inflation -- saying that inflation increased to 3.8 percent in April. Are you -- are you concerned about that? I mean, we’re seeing, you know -- and, obviously, a lot’s going to depend on what happens in the Middle East. But are you concerned about this nagging inflation and it might actually force the Fed to increase interest rates? Hassett replied: HASSETT: No. You know...

Analyzing the Federal Debt with Online Tools and Shiny On March 13, 2026, Yahoo Finance posted an article from Fortune Magazine titled "The national debt isn't $39 trillion. One economist says it's actually $100 trillion" . The article begins: The U.S. national debt is nearly $39 trillion. One of the country's top fiscal economists says the real number is closer to $100 trillion - and that Washington's own accounting rules are designed to hide it. The $39 trillion figure can be verified on the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) website at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN . On March 14, it displayed the following graph: As cam be seem. the federal debt is nearly $39 trillion dollars. Further on, the article states: If the U.S. government were required to report its finances under the same accounting rules as a publicly traded corporation, Smetters pointed out, the debt-to-GDP ratio wouldn't be the current level of 100%, which is bad e...

On December 21, 2025, Margaret Brennan interviewed the White House National Economic Council Director, Kevin Hassett, on "Face the Nation". According to this transcript , it included the following exchange: MARGARET BRENNAN: Let me ask you a bit about tariffs. Since as far back as July, we have heard the president refer to this idea of $2,000 checks being given out to households. The Treasury secretary said this would go to households making less than $100,000. Should Americans plan to receive those checks in 2026? HASSETT: That's going to depend on what happens with Congress. Congress is going to have to send those money to those peoples. But the thing we can say is that since July, we've had a lot of positive news about the economy. We've had a couple of quarters of almost 4% growth. We've got a big government surplus actually running for a few months in a row. The deficit relative to last year, is down by $600 billion and so in the summer, I wasn't s...

On January 9, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Employment Situation Report for December of 2025 . Following is the first paragraph of that report: Both total nonfarm payroll employment (+50,000) and the unemployment rate (4.4 percent) changed little in December, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in food services and drinking places, health care, and social assistance. Retail trade lost jobs. Shortly later, Stephen Moore posted a tweet on X which stated the following: Don't believe the headlines calling this a 'weak jobs report.' The household survey tells the real story: A record number of Americans working and 200,000 more people joining the workforce. Moore's claim that "200,000 more people joining the workforce" in December can be checked on the BLS web site as follows: Go to https://www.bls.gov/ Click on "DATA TOOLS" and then "BLS Popular Series" on the...

On May 25, 2018, Judy Woodruff interviewed Marc Short, White House Director Of Legislative Affairs, on the PBS Newshour. The video and transcript can be found at this link. At 2:43 in the video, Marc Short states the following: And, lastly, in April, we had the largest surplus on record in American history. That is a result of the growth and the revenues coming into the federal government because of the tax plan. READ FULL REPORT