Kevin Hassett, a former senior adviser to former President Donald Trump and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, ripped Vice President Kamala Harris for the remarks that she made during this week’s presidential debate where she rewrote history about the U.S. economy’s recovery under Trump.
Hassett made the remarks during an interview that aired Friday on PBS’ “Firing Line” with Margaret Hoover when asked about Harris’ claim that the Biden-Harris administration had to clean up the economy after Trump’s presidency.
“In the first quarter of President Biden’s first term, for the Biden-Harris first term, then GDP growth was about 6.5% and inflation was about 1%,” he said. “And so the pandemic was just like an awful experience for everybody, of course. And we had the worst quarter that we’ve had since the Great Depression. And through really bipartisan legislation, it passed with unanimous support of Democrats, Republicans and Democrats worked together to repair the economy with a sequence of stimulus bills that were right sized.”
“And so even though we had the biggest decline in GDP since the Great Depression of the second quarter for the year, the GDP was basically just about flat,” he continued. “And then what happened is that because of the recovery, the economy was really taking off in the first quarter. I don’t think any economists would say that they inherited a disaster. In fact, they inherited a recovery that was raging.”
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He said that the U.S.’ recovery was largely driven by the actions taken by both Democrats and Republicans in 2020, when Trump was still president, who passed bills that were “sized almost exactly for the harm that was being done by the lockdowns.”
“The problem was that the first quarter ended up being 6% growth,” he said. “There weren’t any lockdowns. And then they continued another stimulus bill, and that’s where the inflation really started.”
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