Catherine Rampell: Trump Would Be Bad News for the Economy

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller.
It is Super Tuesday. And so we're going to just take a little step back from politics since tomorrow we'll have plenty of breakdown of what happened in our various primaries to the extent that they're still actually happening.
So today I wanted to talk a little bit about the economy and related issues with one of my favorite Bulwark guests ever, Catherine Rampell, syndicated opinion columnist at the Washington Post. She's also an economic and political commentator for CNN and special correspondent for PBS NewsHour.
I'm always clicking when Charlie had you, Catherine, so I'm happy that you're back. Delighted to join you.
Thanks for having me again. It'll be good.
Okay. So I wanted to start with the biggest picture economy question, as it does kind of relate directly to our politics, really.
And my colleague, Jonathan Last, has been on this for a while now. What he says is that we're living in an economic mass delusion, that the economy is actually quite good, and that people's sentiments about the economy are the problem.
He points out that in the entire history of the Optimistic Index Survey, which is a survey of small business owners and how optimistic they feel about the economy, we're currently in the widest gulf between what's actually happening in business and what they think is happening in their business. If you kind of just look at profit margin versus sentiment, that is true of consumers.
It's true of everybody, really. It's starting to change a little bit.
But I'm wondering how you kind of assess that. Is that true? Are we living in the times that are better than people think? Or are people right to be concerned? Where do you fall on that question? I think it's not exactly black and white.
So it is

true that on paper, the economy looks pretty damn spectacular. If you're looking at unemployment, for example, we've had unemployment below 4% for two years now, which is the longest stretch, I think, since the 50s or the 60s, a long time in any event.
GDP growth keeps beating expectations. Inflation, still not great, but has been coming down.

And by a lot of... The 60s, a long time in any event.
GDP growth keeps beating expectations. Inflation, still not great, but has been coming down.

And by a lot of other metrics, of course, we have been beating expectations. We're doing even better, for example, than had been forecast to be the case at this point before COVID happened.
happened. So like if you look at the forecasts that the Congressional Budget Office put out

in January of 2020 and how many jobs they thought we would have and how big they thought the economy would be in inflation-adjusted terms, we are surpassing those numbers. So on paper, yes, looks great.
That doesn't necessarily mean that consumers are delusional. I think people really, really hate inflation.
It is psychologically destabilizing beyond the sort of obvious direct financial economic impacts, you know, that it means that your dollar doesn't go as far, that any wage increase that you get gets at least partly eaten up by higher price growth. I think there's also sort of a subtler psychological tax that we don't entirely understand how to quantify.
When I've talked to consumers, a number of them have mentioned things like, well, now when I go to the grocery store, it's not just a routine visit. Like I have to pay attention to which brand of peanut butter I buy, things like that.
Like things that were once routine become a little bit more complex or when gas prices are high, for example, and they've been coming down. But I remember talking with people about this, I guess it was about a year ago.
Gas prices are high. You have to sort of do these mental calculations about whether a trip to whatever, to Johnny's school play or something like that, how much that's going to eat up in your budget or whether some other get together with a friend is going to be a road trip or whatever.
Right. Exactly.
So there are these other ways that it is mentally taxing. And I think that, again, if you look at wage growth relative to inflation recently, wage growth has been beating inflation.

But there is this sort of, I don't know if I want to call it a conventional wisdom in economics, but there's this sort of understanding that that's not how normal people think about it. They think that when they got a raise, they deserved it.
And inflation is something that happened to them. I've been waiting for this raise for a while.
I was overdue. I was at the store the other day and I bought my child a cookie and it was like a $6 cookie.
I didn't expect it. It was behind the thing.
It's like $4.50 and they're tacking on the tip for the person behind the counter. You're like, what's happening? And this is like these random little annoyances do happen.
Right. And even though, as I said, inflation has been cooling, what that means is prices are not rising as quickly.
It doesn't mean that they're going down and we don't want them to go down. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding among the general public about this.
And I get asked all the time, like, when are prices going to go back down? And I always say, no, they're not. I mean, individual things may fluctuate.
Like I said, gas prices have gone up, they've gone down. Egg prices, when there was a bird flu, went way up, then they came back down.
But in general, the overall price level goes up. And it just couldn't go up more quickly or more slowly.
And we kind of want it to continue going up because when prices are actually overall falling, that's usually a very bad sign for the economy. That's a sign that like, we are in severe crisis.
This is what happened during the Great Depression, for example, prices go down, people wait to buy things because why buy today? You'll be a sucker. You can wait till tomorrow.
And that kind of feeds on itself and spending collapses. In any event, I think the price growth that we have already seen to date is what ticks off consumers.
They have been expecting that prices would fall. As I said, they won't, or at least in general, they will not.
And so maybe you saw the price of that cookie today, and maybe it'll be the same price a week from now. That doesn't mean the price has gone up, but you're still going to be mad a week from now because you remember when it was cheaper.
And look, over time, prices generally go up in general, right? like over decades. But we have more time usually to acclimate to those higher price levels than we've had recently.
So I think what's going to happen is, assuming, knock on wood, that we continue to see the pace of inflation like in the 2%-ish range, which is what we've had recently. it's not quite at 2%, which is what the Fed wants, but it's close.
People will become more

accustomed to that high cookie price. They'll get less mad over time.
The sticker shock will wear

off and we'll go back to just sort of mentally resetting, okay, I guess a cookie costs $6 now,

or whatever. I mean, hopefully not.
But you get the idea. So I think some of it- It wasn't a good cookie, but it wasn't that good.
It was fine. Well, then you should substitute downward to a different cookie and that's a whole different conversation.
But I guess my point is people understandably are shaken by the economic uncertainty that comes with inflation and they're still kind of resentful for the higher prices that they have to pay, even if their wages have gone up. And it will take some time for that grumpiness, whatever you want to call it, resentment to fade, assuming that, again, like we don't have a recession, the Fed gets inflation lower, inflation, not prices.
Again, different things. Assuming we get back on track, I think eventually that unhappiness will fade.
And we're already seeing it fade. In fact, if you look at consumer confidence numbers, consumer optimism numbers, assessments of the overall economy, they are improving.
They're not spectacular, I would say, but they are definitely picking up. Actually, just before we hopped on this call, I was looking at the share of Americans who, I think it was who rate the economy as good or excellent, something like that from a recent survey from, I think it was YouGov and The Economist.
I was looking at their time series data. So like over the past few years, and it's been going up.
It's still low. It's still like, I want to say in the 30s or 40s, and it was a bit lower.
So people are getting less unhappy, even if they are not like effusively happy. You know, I assume we're talking about this in the political context.
What does this mean for the election? This is the question, right? Like, does it happen before the election? You know, the Wall Street Journal poll that I was going to just ask you about had 43% said their personal finances are heading the right direction. In the most recent poll late last year, it was 34%, right? And it was, so you've seen some movement in that direction.
The question is, how long the lag are we talking, right? Because if people start feeling better about their economic standing during the Donald Trump autocracy next spring, that's not really that great of timing. Yes.
And I don't know the answer to that. As I said, there has been some uptick in recent months in assessments of the economy.
And then there are two follow-up questions. One is, does that continue? And the other question is, does it break through?

Is there some reflected glory upon Biden? And I think that is the more troubling question for me right now. So like on the first question, does it continue? If you look at a precedent from 2012, for example, a little over a year before Obama was up for re-election in 2012, his chances of winning re-election were considered to be relatively poor or at least risky.
Also, views of the economy were quite dour. And then as views of the economy picked up, you know, approval ratings for Obama kind of moved

upward in tandem. We so far have not seen that with Biden.
And I'm talking about, I think, the same Wall Street Journal poll. They actually talked about this, that so far there is some pickup in economic confidence, people's assessment of their own personal finances, as you cited, but that doesn't seem to be translating so far for Biden.

And the puzzle is a little bit about why. And in fact, there was a series of polls that came out over the weekend, or at least in the past week, that looked at this question of like, how do you write the economy? And then there were other questions about how do you feel about Biden's handling of the economy? Or do you think

Biden or Trump would be better for prices? Do you think Biden or Trump would be better for the

economy, etc.? And I think it's kind of troubling so far that even though people are happy, are

happier, I should say, with the economy, they do not seem to be happier with Biden's handling of

the economy. And in fact, if you look at things like CBS News, I believe it was, had a question on

Thank you. They do not seem to be happier with Biden's handling of the economy.
And in fact, if you look at things like CBS News, I believe it was, had a question on, do you think prices would go up or down in a second Trump term or in a second Biden term? And people were about twice as likely to say prices would go down under Trump. Maybe they're accidentally right, because Trump would kind of usher in some kind of recession.
A Great Depression. A lot of these questions, vibes and psychology, which is part of economics.
But you posted the other day about Trump's actual proposals, which I think are important to kind of enter into the discussion here as well. He obviously wants to increase tariffs.
He wants to reduce the labor supply, cracking down on legal and illegal immigration. He wants to continue to expand deficits, although he's not exactly clear on that, but more tax cuts would be coming.
You wrote NECAP, the independent agency tasks with price stability. All these things are on the margin inflationary.
Trump is not actually proposing any deflationary, right? Like there's no actual substantive proposals for tackling inflation. In fact, all those proposals would be inflationary.
And yet, you know, sometimes this gets lost in this conversation, the actual policy. Yeah.
So to be fair, there is little that presidents can do to reduce inflation or reduce prices outright. You know, I have plenty of qualms with things that Biden has done.
I think that there are things that he has left on the table that would, on the margin, help a little bit. They're mostly things like reversing the existing Trump era tariffs that we still have, but there are things on the margin that can help a little bit.
There's a lot more that they can do to screw things up. And the four things that you just mentioned that I've written about before and tweeted about before most recently are things that could be quite bad.
We don't know the magnitude. There have been some attempts to quantify it.
So like Evercore ISI, which is a private economic analysis organization, they had looked at, I think, the first three of those, those being the trade wars, reductions to labor supply through mass deportations and ending various forms of legal immigration, and more expansionary fiscal policy, whether through tax cuts or additional spending, or probably both based on his track record. Probably both.
I mean, that's what he did before. If you look at, like everybody thinks about, oh, the main way that he expanded the deficit was through these unfunded tax cuts.
Actually, he added a lot of additional spending as well, even before COVID. Like, well before COVID, he added trillions to deficits just through spending.
Anyway, so Evercore looked at this, and I believe they estimated that in the near term, those kind of inflationary policies would cause the Fed to raise rates by about a quarter to a half a percentage point. In more jargony speak, they would raise the neutral rate by about that much.
And that's just the first three. The thing that I am most concerned about is how Trump might meddle with the Federal Reserve, which it's a politically independent agency today.
It needs to maintain its political independence in order to be a credible fighter against inflation. You can look at all sorts of other countries in which the central bank was under the control of politicians, Argentina, Venezuela, pre-Euro Italy, various other places, where if the public perceives the central bank as not independent, it's much harder to keep inflation under control, particularly once inflation has already gotten up.
Because there's always going to be this temptation to just print more money to do what the people in political charge want. So I'm very concerned about that.
When Trump was president, he tried to install a bunch of clownish cronies in Fed jobs. Fortunately, it was not successful.
His first few Fed choices, I think, were actually quite good, including Jay Powell, as it turns out, who is currently the chair of the Federal Reserve and whom Biden reappointed. But then towards the end of his term, he started nominating very silly people and people who pretty deliberately wanted to just have the president brunt thinks so I think it's pretty likely Trump would do that again.
And the result of that potentially could be that even if the Fed actually maintains its independence, it may have to raise rates more than it would otherwise to demonstrate to markets that it is credibly independent. So anyway, all of those things put together a ban.
And the fact that Americans overwhelmingly view Trump as better for the thing that they claim to care the most about, inflation, is troubling given that he would overwhelmingly be worse. Now, it's really hard to explain that to the public in part because we didn't have problems with inflation when Trump was president.
And in fact, we didn't have it for several decades. That's part of the reason why it's been so disruptive lately because we're not used to it.
So it's really hard to say, well, it would be really bad. And then they're like, well, it wasn't so bad before.
And you have to look at, well, how has the landscape changed? What actual policies i feel like i'm like i'm doomed to live this cycle because as a young republican i was always like clinton's getting credit for the bush and reagan recovery and like he's getting credit for it now i'm like biden is getting blamed for stuff that happened anyway i'd be interested in your actual assessment on that it's's some of the, I think, obviously COVID, some of the huge spending, as we discussed during Trump's era, then Biden does the additional spending package. It was probably overkill.
And then some of it's out of his control versus with Ukraine and what's happening. So how do you kind of assess all those factors if you were grading people looking back? Yeah.
So there are a number of things that contributed to the bout of inflation we have been experiencing and are still trying to work our way out of. And I think it's really hard to assign exact credit or blame to specific factors, but I can tell you generally what I think the factors are.
Major supply chain problems led to big bottlenecks. And that happened here, that happened around the world.
People remember that, of course, how difficult it was to get toilet paper, among other things. Two is that at the same time that supply was very constrained, demand was really strong, meaning people really wanted to buy stuff and had the means to buy stuff.
Why did they have the means to buy stuff? Partly, it was about lockdowns limiting how much people were going out to restaurants and how much they were traveling. They had a lot of forced savings and a lot of desire to buy stuff and, again, the means to buy it.
Part of it was government policy giving people a lot of cash. And there are good things about that and there are bad things about that.
So I think it's generally a good thing that the government served as a backstop for people who lost their jobs out of no actual wrongdoing on their part, but because the restaurant they worked out was closed, for example. Right.
Or some other business that they used to work for, you know, could no longer operate or lost a lot of customers. I think it's good that we have that as a safety net.
There were a lot of other things that we did that I think are, I'm more dubious about their merits, or I think were obviously a bad idea. So I think, for example, the universal checks, or I should say near universal, almost everybody got them, two of which went out under Trump, one of which went out under Biden.
I think those were not a good idea. They were not targeted based on need.
They gave people a lot of cash when higher income people in particular, again, had forced savings and predominantly had not lost their jobs. You know, there was sort of this white collar, blue collar break to some extent.
So you had a lot of high income, white collar people working from home, didn't lose their jobs, had a lot of savings. You just gave them more cash to spend and it was expensive.
So there were a lot of things like that. I think the Fed did not raise interest rates quickly enough to deal with the problem.
That was in 2021. I think the Fed started raising interest rates not until March of 2022.
So they were a little bit behind the eight ball. And then there were other things, like the war in Ukraine that disrupted energy markets around the world.

Candidly, Europe was much more exposed to that than we were. We have our own energy sources here, but it did help drive up gas prices.
So there were a bunch of these shocks, bird flu, various other things that made us unlucky or that made those things more salient, I guess, than they might have otherwise been. So there are a number of contributors, like I said, to what extent is it about too much fiscal stimulus or monetary stimulus versus supply side issues? I think economists will be debating that for years.
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That's joindeliteme.com slash bulwark code bulwark. On just the economic side projecting out ahead the next six months, I think that there was a period of time where people were deeply concerned we're going to have a recession.
We haven't had one. You hear less about that now.
What worries do you have? You mentioned the energy shocks. I think that there are going to be a lot of foreign powers that would be keen to have Donald Trump win that might try to put their thumb on the scale.
What for you are the economic worries as you look at the data and project out over the next six months, nine months? So I should say my worries are mostly for the health of the republic than for the health of the economy. I think the economy is in a better place than it has been.
As you know, there had been a lot of fears about recession. A year ago, I want to say the baseline case among Wall Street economists was a 60% chance of recession within the next 12 months.
We're 12 months on it. We haven't had one.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's good.
I was worried about a recession too. So I think generally the economy is in a better place.
I think, again, there are ways that a future leader or Congress could screw stuff up if we have a recession, let's say. Maybe it's something I haven't noticed.
Maybe it's some shock. The war gets worse.
And besides the humanitarian toll, maybe that has bigger effects on energy markets. Who knows? I am concerned about how that would be handled, both because we don't know who's going to be president.
If Trump is president, I do not trust any of his instincts. I also worry about how dysfunctional Congress is to be able to respond to anything such as a major period of economic pain.
It seems unlikely that they'd be able to get anything done. I'm worried about, again, meddling with the independence of the Fed.
I'm worried about, a lot of these things are sort of Trump-specific, but I'm worried about Trump's instincts or desire to have these global tariffs, 10% global tar all goods and then 60 apparently on chinese goods that's going to be bad for our economy that's going to be bad for our relationships with our allies and our ability to join with our allies to sort of gang up on china about policies that they're practicing that we don't like yeah so there are a lot of things that I'm concerned about. And then there are some like kind of narrower issues.
For example, House Republicans have been trying to cut funding for WIC, which is a program that provides nutritional support for pregnant women, new moms, babies, and toddlers who are found to be at nutritional risk. This is a program that has had bipartisan support for 25 years to be fully funded.
House Republicans, not Senate Republicans, I should clarify, have been trying to cut it for reasons I don't quite understand. But a lot of the things that I think House Republicans are for these days are hard to map onto specific principles.
Trolling, owning people. You have to own poor women.
It's just part of the... Poor moms.
Yeah, poor moms need to be owned, I think, is the main policy principle there. Yeah, so I have a number of concerns about what happens to specific vulnerable populations in addition to what happens to the macroeconomy and our relationships with our allies and partners.
All right. I want to continue our concern for vulnerable populations and our neoliberal power hour here by talking about your recent immigration article, something that I'm obsessed with.
You write that voters and political strategists have treated our country's ability to draw immigrants from around the world as a curse. Could be a blessing if only we view it as that way.

Talk about how this recent surge in immigration has been a gift to the economy. I also would add on top of that, which you mentioned, the inflationary aspects of this.
I don't understand why that doesn't seem to get mentioned very often about the fact that having increased workforce is helpful. I remember back towards when we were coming out of the pandemic, when people were simultaneously complaining about inflation, complaining that they weren't getting good services at restaurants or coffee shops that they were going to, and also complaining about immigration.
I was like, these things don't combine. So anyway, talk about your recent article about immigration and what you think kind of the best thing that Biden could do to kind of match economic interests,

political interests. Yeah, it's interesting.
So like I said, I have my grumbles about how Biden

has handled inflation to the extent that he can have any impact whatsoever, which I think is

modest. Again, it's mostly up to the Fed.
I think the one unsung thing that the administration has

done they don't really want to talk about is that they have made the legal immigration system

and I'll see you next time. think the one unsung thing that the administration has done they don't really want to talk about is that they have made the legal immigration system in particular a lot more functional than it was when they came into office.
Our immigration system and how we handle illegal immigration has been broken for many decades. So like there's a limit on how much they can actually improve it.
We're grading on a curve here, an improvement curve, you know, we're not running efficiently. It's not Germany, but we're grading on an improvement curve.
Yeah, right. I don't know that Germany is the paragon of all this stuff, but that's a different podcast.
Anyway. Canada, would you have been better? Canada's been having some problems too, but they've done a better job.
Yeah. So when Trump was on his way out of office, he did a bunch of things to just like totally

destroy the system.

There were huge backlogs in processing work permits, again, for people who were here legally.

There were, you know, lots of changes to the system for how skilled workers came here to

like add tons more bureaucracy and paperwork and red tape.

Thank you. to the system for how skilled workers came here to like add tons more bureaucracy and paperwork and red tape.
It's funny because people have this idea of Trump as mostly having gone after undocumented immigrants, but really where he was most effective was at slashing levels of legal immigration. And you can see that in the numbers.

I'm not making this up. You know, there are official government reports about how many people come here on visas, how many people get a change of status to a green card, things like that, get naturalized.
And on almost all of those metrics, the system was just like in tatters. Biden and some of his appointees came in and can't fix everything, but they did get a bunch more funding for the agency that handles most legal immigration called USCIS.
They made a bunch of policy changes to undo some dumb things Trump did to try to make processes more efficient, like boring stuff. But the net result is that the system is sort of back to where it was pre-Trump.
And on top of that, obviously, you have a surge of people coming to the border, applying for asylum. Many of them are now allowed to be here temporarily while their case works through the system.
Some of them are waiting for their work paper. Some of them are not eligible yet, whatever, but some of them are making their way into the workforce.
And that increase in the foreign-born population is pretty much entirely responsible for the last few months to a year of job growth, like on net. If you look at the number of native-born Americans who are in the workforce who have jobs, it has been declining.
The number of foreign-born workers has been increasing, and that's just a matter of demographics. Native-born Americans are much older.
They're more likely to be aging into retirement. Those who are foreign born are disproportionately working age.
Overall, this has been a very useful thing to the economy. And as you point out, there are certain sectors that are disproportionately reliant on immigrant labor, whether we're talking about undocumented immigrants or documented.
Things like food services, agriculture, hospitality, etc. And those were a lot of the sectors that were experiencing the biggest labor shortages and had for a while very high price growth.
And when I talk about the things that Trump would do that are not just about the undocumented population, but also about the population of people who are here lawfully, food is a great example. So Trump has gotten a lot of attention for talking about how he would round up everybody who's undocumented and engage in these mass deportations, maybe with a concentration camp thrown in there somewhere for a whole bunch of reasons.
I find that very troubling, But he would also dismantle the legal system that we have that brings seasonal agricultural workers here. There's a whole program for that.
Again, legal system, he would get rid of it. So I think there are a lot of problems with our immigration system that could be fixed.
We have so far benefited from the fact that parts of it are more functional than they were when Biden came into office. And over the longer sweep of American history, the fact that the United States has been able to draw global talent to us has been a blessing.
So it's not just about the last few years with the pandemic and the labor shortages. And this is true if you look at the contributions, the disproportionately large contributions immigrants have made to our entrepreneurship, to our R&D, to other metrics of innovation, like how many patents do people file? There's been a ton of research looking at this and looking at various periods of American history where we've had more restrictive or less restrictive immigration policies like the quota acts early in the 20th century and how that affected various parts of our sort of scientific institutions in the United States because those were disproportionately hurting certain areas of scientific inquiry.
You know, like there's been a bunch of research on this, all of which is to say, there are a lot of dimensions in which this infusing of new blood and new talent into the United States has been overwhelmingly good for us. And the piece that you are referring to, I talked about a recent CBO, Congressional Budget Office report that found that they revised upward their forecasts for GDP, the size of the economy, over the next decade by trillions of dollars because we've had more immigrants come in than they had forecast the last time around.
But I also concluded, as you may recall, with a quote from Reagan, where in one of his very last speeches as president, he spoke about how, I don't remember the exact verbiage used, but it was something about like the reason why we have, as a country, been able to renew ourselves and been able to have this sort of economic miracle that we have enjoyed is partly that generation after generation, we have the ability to attract new talent here. And that message, you know, whether like in sort of the more poetic version or the more prosaic version, just looking at the data has been lost in this debate over immigration, where everyone sort of seems to start from the premise that immigration is a problem to be solved rather than a gift to be channeled to our economic advantage and frankly our moral standing in the world.
If you give me an opportunity to read Reagan, I'm going to do it. You quote, thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
The other element of this is that I feel like is a really meaningful change from 2016. I can't figure out why.
There was a big group of high-profile entrepreneurs, particularly in Silicon Valley and the tech industry, that were very vocal in 2016 about how grossed out they were about Trump's rhetoric and how critical immigrant workers were to innovation and to these businesses that have brought so much to the American economy and culture, et cetera. And that is like silent.
I feel like now you hear much more from the contrarian tech bro that is outraged about the border and asylum, et cetera, et cetera. Not that there aren't legitimate concerns about the border, but just the weight you know the type of rhetoric that you're hearing that is something that's frustrating to me and i don't know if people just got bored with this or they don't want to get on trump's bad side or you know it's hard to get into the psychology of that but i do think this argument that you make is kind of absent right now from our discourse which is frustrating i don't think it's entirely absent.
There are still some tech leaders. By the way, tech has a very high share of immigrant entrepreneurs and talented workers in that sector themselves.
There are still tech companies, tech leaders who are vocal about the need for more immigration, you know, whether we're talking about

protecting dreamers, for example, or expanding opportunities for higher skilled workers to come

here. I think the political allyship question has grown more complicated, right? Because

the natural party home for that sort of sentiment would lately be Democrats, and Democrats have a

Take care. has grown more complicated, right? Because the natural party home for that sort of sentiment would lately be Democrats, and Democrats have a terrible relationship with Silicon Valley right now.
For better or for worse, big tech has become a punching bag among Democrats and Republicans, for that matter. So I wonder if that complicates the ability to work together or the messaging, but I don't think it's entirely absent.
I just think you don't see necessarily as effective an alliance on some of these core public policy issues because everything has become culture war issues, even economic issues. Yeah, the volume maybe is just down a little bit.
Okay, two more things before I let you go that you've written about recently. One is another issue that Biden did some good things on that he's hesitant to talk about, not just legal immigration changes, but energy, American energy boom.
You write the secret both parties want to keep about U.S. energy.
Just talk briefly about that and what we've seen in the economy as far as, you know, the increase in energy production in America during the Biden years and kind of assessing why it seems to be a secret. Sure.
So almost every major source of energy, whether we are talking about solar, wind, natural gas, almost everything is at record highs or has recently touched record highs in terms of production. Oil, great example.
There is this narrative out there, I think mostly propagated by conservatives, that Biden has like turned off the oil spigot. And in fact, we have been producing more oil than has been the case at any time on record.
We have had, you know, to the extent people talk about like energy independence, which I think is supposed to mean the idea that we're exporting more than we're importing. At least that's what it meant during the Trump era when Trump talked about energy independence, that we had finally achieved it.
We are there, and we have been there for over a year, the longest stretch in U.S. history, meaning that we are a net exporter of petroleum and petroleum products.
So on a lot of different dimensions, you know, with the exception of coal, that's the main exception, we are producing more energy than ever. And it's kind of an inconvenient set of facts for both parties to tout.
For Republicans who want to maintain the story that Biden has turned off the oil spigot, that he's crushing our energy production, that we are no longer energy independent, it's really inconvenient to acknowledge that, in fact, we are, at least by the metric that they seem to have once adopted. For Democrats, it's a little bit hard to blast this story too loudly because Democrats obviously have very complicated feelings about fossil fuels.
And great that the Biden administration has presided over record high investments in wind, solar, battery production, etc. But less convenient for the more climate minded left that fossil fuel production, natural gas and, have also reached record highs.
It's like everybody's telling themselves a story that doesn't quite fit the facts.

And that the Biden administration, I think, could stand to benefit from megaphoning.

Getting him out there, hard hat, on a rig, get some oil on his face.

Yes, exactly. Whatever.
Yeah. But they're too afraid of the left to do that.
We're going to ask the White House about this. We're going to talk to them later this week.
Okay. Lastly, I would be remiss to let you go without talking about Wendy's.
As I were discussing having you on the podcast, I saw a social media post from somebody with the quote, won't somebody please think about the poor corporations with a screenshot of your article about Wendy's. Your article is titled, Stop Your Populous Grandstanding Over Wendy's Surge Pricing.
You could not be in a safer space to make this case than at the Bullock Podcast. You pointed out Elizabeth Warren called it price gouging and Bob Casey called it predatory and greedy.
And it's like, it's happy hour. It's a fancy word for they're having happy hour.
Yes. Yes, exactly.
To be clear, Wendy's actually never used the term surge pricing. They said they were doing dynamic pricing.
And dynamic pricing basically just means the prices change. That's it don't say with what frequency they don't say when basically what they meant was happy hour that they were going to have discounts uh at certain times of day sonic one of their rivals already does this you know there's another burger chain as you point out like lots of restaurants do something similar whether it's happy hour or bird special.
But for some reason, I'm eating those early bird specials. That's our dinner hour.
Well, apparently Elizabeth Warren is very against them. So, yeah.
So what happened was there was like this spate of outrage porn media, furious at the idea that like Wendy's was going to start price gouging people. And then all of these demagogue populist politicians decided this was their moment to like make greedflation happen again.
If you look at other stuff I've written, I've written a lot making fun of the greedflationists, making fun of is too perturative, trying to educate people about why greed is not the right way to understand inflation. You'll notice that when you asked me before to summarize what was behind inflation, greed was not a word I used.
Corporations are always greed. They didn't suddenly get greedier.
In any event, oh my God. So there were a bunch of predictably dumb responses to this Wendy's announcement from people who were, I think, trying to get their names back in the news or whatever.
I wrote about it. You would not believe the amount of vitriol I got in response to this column being like, hey, guys, this is happy hour.
You're a pro-corporate Wendy's fascist. What is Dave paying you?

Are you on the payroll?

You know, the irony is I don't even really like Wendy's that much.

Who does?

I mean, some people do.

No knock on that.

I mean, I could have a Frosty for now and then, but you know.

Yeah, but what I said was in the column, like, this Wendy CEO kind of stepped in it.

Like, he should never have used the term dynamic pricing.

Like, I understand that he was speaking before an audience of potential investors who want to hear higher prices. But a surcharge off of a low price is no different from a discount off of a higher price.
Like they are mathematically the same thing. But one of them is more tolerable to the public than the other, you know, easier to stomach, so to speak.
And so if they had just started out by saying we're going to charge lower prices at certain times of day to like get people in the door when we have spare capacity, I think that would have been a better way to frame it and would have been less of a PR disaster. So I think that they did screw up, but I think the problem was with the PR strategy and not with the, from what we know of the pricing strategy.
But yeah, like, oh my God, you would not believe the stuff that I've gotten in response to this. I get really nasty stuff all the time, but usually it's when I write about like hot button issues, like immigration or student debt forgiveness or whatever.
And this was like about burger discounts and people were very unhappy. Well, if you are unhappy with Catherine, go show that by getting your Frosty and Burger from somewhere that does not do happy hour and does not do dynamic pricing.
Find a non-greedy corporation to get your happy meal from. So not McDonald's either, I guess.
You'll find one. There's somebody out there making a cheap burger just for you.

Catherine Rampell, thank you so much for doing this.

Please come back soon.

Sure thing.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate you.

Talk soon.

We'll see you all tomorrow with some Super Tuesday talk.

Bye-bye. The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brett. some breath.
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