Janet Yellen on the Danger of a “Banana Republic” Economy. Plus, Susan B. Glasser on Why “We Are the Boiled Frog.”

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

The Trump administration has just pulled off another sweeping change to the United States.

A few moments, we're going to make official the greatest victory yet when I sign the one big, beautiful bill.

The budget bill, beautiful or not, includes cuts to social services that would have been unthinkable in earlier Republican administrations.

10 and a half million people will be kicked off of Medicaid and the children's health insurance program in the next decade.

SNAP and other nutrition programs will be cut by $186 billion.

Now, the foundational belief in conservative economics is that cuts to social services are necessary to shrink the expanding deficit.

But the so-called big, beautiful bill is hardly an austerity measure.

It's a windfall for the wealthy.

The Cato Institute estimates that it will add $6 trillion to the national debt.

That's $6 trillion.

So to get a sense of how this is supposed to work, I called up Janet Yellen.

Few people understand the American economy better than Janet Yellen.

She's served as Treasury Secretary, leader of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and chair of the Federal Reserve.

Her term as the Fed chair overlapped with Donald Trump's first term in office, and curiously enough, they really didn't come into that much conflict.

But Trump now wants even more control over economic policy, and he's hurling brick bats and insults at his own appointee for the Fed chair, Jerome Powell.

I spoke with Janet Yellen last week.

What are the implications for us in our daily lives?

What are the possibilities that a federal deficit that's grown by that much, how will that affect things?

Interest payments on this debt are now the second largest expenditure in our overall budget.

Defense comes first, interest comes next.

Now, Americans have told us their key concern is the cost of living.

Part of that is high housing costs, and part of that in turn reflects mortgage rates that are much higher than they were for many years before the pandemic.

And what this is going to do is to raise interest rates even more.

And so housing will become less affordable, car loans less affordable.

This bill also contains changes that raise the burdens of anyone who has already taken on student debt.

And with higher interest rates, further education, college, professional school become less affordable.

And it may also curtail investment spending, which has a negative impact on growth.

And so most analysts, when they look at the long-term impacts, this is something that will harm economic growth rather than stimulate it.

There are huge, steep cuts to Medicaid,

which provides health coverage for the poorest Americans.

What's the extent of the cuts in Medicaid?

How will people feel the impact of this bill?

Well, it's estimated that 12 million people will lose Medicaid coverage.

Entirely.

Entirely.

So there are work requirements for Medicaid.

And one thing the bill does is it makes it very much more complicated and burdensome to show that you qualify for Medicaid.

And think of people who have work that is not secure and have low incomes having to go through a paperwork burden of documenting every hour that they have worked to qualify during the previous year.

People will just find it impossible to meet that type of burden and won't be able to claim benefits.

But when you listen to President Trump describe the bill, I've heard him say, oh, nobody is going to lose health insurance, only people who were fraudulently claiming it.

Well, many members of Congress, including many Republicans, are concerned that rural hospitals that depend on Medicaid patients and this funding, that the the states are not going to be able to step in and provide the amount of money that they're losing from the federal government.

And so probably many rural hospitals will close.

But, you know, he can portray it as

he

just says the opposite of what is true.

Both parties, for as long as I've been around, have talked about cutting deficits, and in reality, in reality, we keep increasing them.

This is not unique to the Trump administration.

Why is this different?

We, at this point, have a serious deficit problem.

We didn't two years ago?

We did two years ago.

And it's getting worse for reasons we have known about for 30 years.

That is that we have an aging population.

The baby boomers are retiring.

The three biggest programs that are so-called mandatory outside of discretionary spending.

So, Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare.

And the size of these programs will continue to escalate over time.

So, that is a force that's making deficits worse.

Aaron Powell, there are economists out there who poo-poo the idea that deficits are so profoundly dangerous.

They even argue that deficits don't matter all that much.

What is their rationale and why, in your view, are they wrong?

Well, I'm not a person who always thinks deficits are terrible, and I think that there are times when deficits are desirable.

When are those?

I think it was totally appropriate that during World War II, the U.S.

debt rose to its highest level relative to GDP.

The pandemic, we had huge spending, and this occurred even before Biden Biden was elected to deal with the fallout.

That's a good reason for deficits.

And sometimes the economy is just really weak, and we need to create jobs by providing stimulus.

But we have a 4.1 percent unemployment rate.

I would call that full employment.

Inflation is low, growth has been solid, and yet our debt-to-GDP ratio is at 100%, which is the highest since World War II.

So at this point, and knowing that they're going to rise more in the future, if both parties have said they want to protect Social Security and Medicare, if you do that

and you're not willing to cut those programs, then you have to find some other way of containing the deficits at least somewhat.

And if we get ourselves in a situation where we need to reduce deficits to get our debt under control, we do the tough stuff.

It's not pleasant, but the United States is a good idea.

What would be the tough stuff?

The tough stuff is we have to raise taxes.

Okay, and that's what's wrong with what's happening now.

Because let me be clear about this.

If you don't touch Social Security and Medicare, and

Congress just cut Medicaid and food stamps significantly, what else is there?

Okay, now people carry on about, oh, we have out-of-control discretionary spending.

But discretionary funding is not that profound in the big picture, is it?

It is very small, and it has been declining as a share of GDP.

And there is just not enough waste fraud abuse or anything like it to be able to find significant further cuts outside of defense.

Despite the spectacle of Doge, for example.

Yeah, Doge came, and you know what Doge did is they found minor savings by choking off foreign aid to the rest of the world and the like.

And then what they did was slash the Internal Revenue Service staff.

And

we have estimated

uncollected taxes.

This is called the tax gap.

And what it is, is the amount of taxes we ought to be be collecting versus what we actually are collecting under existing law.

That gap is estimated at something like $700 billion a year.

Because people are able to cheat more efficiently.

Cheat.

And who cheats?

It's not working-class people who are Trump voters who get W-2s in the mail.

It's high-income and net-worth individuals.

It is complex business partnerships and corporations.

And Congress Congress cut the funding of the Internal Revenue Service to such a low level

that

the audit rate went to close to zero on these entities.

And we were in the process of rebuilding the Internal Revenue Service.

Every dollar we spent on that, we estimated over 10 years would yield $10 of additional revenue.

So it's not costly, it's net saver.

And Musk came in and he's cut IRS staffing by a third, and he fired all of the tax accountants and lawyers and IT professionals.

And when we see what the cost of that is going to be to revenue collections,

I would absolutely think that those losses will overwhelm any savings that he got from the slash and burn he did elsewhere.

And do you suspect that that was Elon Musk's idea all along?

It would not surprise me.

I don't know, because I think anyone who knew anything about the federal budget would have seen that

discretionary government spending outside of defense had been declining and declining and is way below the level it's averaged for the last 30 years.

When you look at Donald Trump insulting his own pick for Fed chair, Jerome Powell, what do you think?

He's called him a fool, a numbskull, a stupid person.

This is a guy that he put in place.

Why is he so abusive toward Jerome Powell?

And why is he so desperate to lower interest rates, which is what he's constantly on Powell to do?

One of his most recent comments about Powell, he said,

look,

interest on the federal debt, it is huge.

As I mentioned, it's the second largest spending item after defense.

We're spending about a trillion dollars a year on interest on the federal debt.

Well, look, if interest rates were lower, the cost of financing the federal debt would be lower.

And doesn't that sound like it's a great way to lower budget deficits and help us solve our underlying problem?

And that's exactly what Trump said he wants Powell to do, and he can't understand why he's such a numbskull that he won't do that.

Well,

if I'm allowed to give the answer as to why Powell is not allowed to do it, the words that Trump uttered

are the words one expects from the head of a banana republic that is about to start printing money to fund fiscal deficits when a country, and I can give you lots of examples, Argentina is a classic case.

Think of all the countries that have suffered from bouts of high inflation in Latin America and Zimbabwe and other places.

Governments get in a position where their expenses can't be financed by tax revenue.

and they find it politically difficult to either cut spending or to raise taxes.

And then the market becomes less and less comfortable with absorbing the debt they have to issue to cover this shortfall.

Aaron Powell, and so the ramifications of, and the outcome of that is what?

The outcome of that is that they go to their central bank and say, we're selling the debt to you, and you should pay for it by printing money.

And then you get very high inflation or hyperinflation.

And Powell absolutely won't do this and won't accept this type of reasoning because this is the road to allowing inflation to get out of control.

And the Fed made an explicit agreement back in 1950 with the U.S.

Treasury

because during World War II,

the Fed had tried to keep interest rates low to help finance the war.

And it allowed inflation to pick up.

And there was

an agreement that essentially created Fed independence.

It was later enshrined by laws that, no, the Fed's job is to keep inflation low and stable or price stability and to try to create a strong job market, maximum employment.

That's what the Fed does.

You spent two years as Fed chair under Barack Obama and then two years under Donald Trump.

Tell me a little bit about how those experiences differed.

Well, I met infrequently with both.

But in Obama's case, he expressed interest in understanding the economy and the economic outlook.

And I met with other members of his administration.

And there's a long tradition in which the Fed Chair and Treasury Secretary meet on a very regular basis.

But I will say during that time,

never

did anybody attempt to lobby me about monetary policy.

Not a soul ever uttered to me, we think you should do X.

And under Trump?

I had the same set of contacts, and I met a couple of times with Trump.

What was that like?

Well, so first let me say interest rates were extremely low during this time.

And he once said to me, you're like me.

You're a low interest rate person.

I like that.

Well,

you know, I probably should have added, I'm a low interest rate person for now

because inflation is too low and unemployment is too high.

And we're doing everything possible we can to try to improve that picture and it calls for low rates.

But in another time and under different circumstances, I wouldn't be a low interest rate person.

Aaron Powell, one of the names being floated is Powell's replacement as Fed chair is the current Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson.

Now, Besson said he would, quote, do what the President wants.

What happens if the Federal Reserve is completely beholden to the President?

How does that change the dynamic and the ethics of government?

Well, I mean, in my experience,

we really haven't seen that in decades.

There are stories about

Arthur Burns having been

strong-armed by Richard Nixon and some earlier stories.

It would have various implications.

And I say, Trump has said he absolutely intends to appoint a replacement for Powell who will lower interest rates.

And I want to be careful here because

right now, the economy is doing well, but there are reasons to think the labor market may get weaker and that inflation may subside.

And it could be appropriate to lower interest rates at some time in the future.

So there are good reasons to lower interest rates and bad, but if a replacement lowers them for reasons considered to be inappropriate, given an independent institution, you will see a pronounced market response.

And markets let the Fed and the President know what they're thinking about his proposals and actions.

And in addition, the Fed structure is set up so that

the chairman of the Fed, he's not an independent decision maker over interest rates.

All of the governors, there are seven governors and then five presidents of reserve banks, there are 12 people who vote on interest rates.

And it's not so easy to strong arm them

or

other necessarily other members of the Board of Governors.

I know you're pressed for time, but I'd be remiss to not ask you about the president's tariff policy, which you at one point said was the worst self-inflicted wound that you could imagine.

And you said that the average household would see a thousand dollar reduction in income.

At least.

At least.

Now,

so far, after a lot of chaos in the markets, there's been a kind of evening out, a little bit more stability, certainly in the stock market and other indicators.

Is there no chance that Donald Trump has proven himself, at least to some degree, as a dealmaker, as he has with NATO, for example?

He really pushed the NATO countries hard.

And that turned out to be, arguably, a good thing.

I agree with that.

Is it not possible that on tariffs he set out to freak out, to use a technical economic term,

some competitive countries, knowing that he would

dial things back as the bargaining process went along?

Aaron Powell,

he signed a very minor deal with the United Kingdom.

He claims that there's a deal with Vietnam, but he's going to impose 20% tariffs.

He doesn't like the fact that South Korea and Japan, two of our biggest trading partners after Canada, Mexico, and China, aren't offering enough concessions.

And he said they're both going to face 25% tariffs.

Now, when you say success, I guess the question is, what do you mean by success?

First of all, he just thinks that the United States is being treated really unfairly and always has by every other country in the world.

And I don't know what factual basis there is to think that.

Now, China I have a lot of problems with.

I don't want to put China in the bucket of all is wealth.

You agree that we get a bad deal with China.

In many ways.

But I still think we benefit from trade and investment with China.

So I would not want to see that collapse.

But what about Canada and Mexico?

We have deeply integrated economies.

He signed a trade deal with them during his first term.

Billions and billions of dollars of investment in all of our countries, including the United States, have been made on the basis that we are a tariff-free area.

And no one said that these countries have not played by the rules they have.

And we've benefited from this.

And he's just, I'm coming in and ripping this up.

Janet Yellen, thanks so much.

I appreciate it.

My pleasure, David.

Thanks for the invitation.

Janet Yellen is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

She's a former chair of the Federal Reserve and served as Treasury Secretary.

under President Biden.

Now, the budget bill, as Janet Yellen has just laid out, is going to have enormous consequences in this economy.

It will raise the deficit by trillions of dollars and it's going to hurt a great many of Trump's supporters.

So what were the Republicans in Congress thinking when they passed it?

I think it tells us about a new political reality in which the Trump White House has concluded that its voters, even if they are forced to bear some of the pain of this bill, they will not abandon them because of other priorities, such as partisan loyalty, tribal loyalty, and the culture war, the idea that Trump is on their side, even if he's not on their side.

Washington correspondent Susan Glasser joins us next.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

I spoke earlier with economist Janet Yellen about the Republican budget bill, the impact of escalating deficits on our economy, and the unending trade deal chaos that's coming from the White House.

Now, some of these moves have been deeply unpopular, not least with the traditional deficit hawks in Trump's own party.

Elon Musk is making noise about targeting the bill's proponents in the primaries.

And in The New Yorker, our Washington correspondent Susan Glasser's column said this, rarely have so many members of Congress voted for a measure they so actively disliked.

But vote for it they did.

Now, will any of this have real political consequences for Donald Trump and the Republican Party?

Will it matter in the midterms?

Susan, according to a recent poll, more than 40% of Donald Trump's voters, 40% of them, rely on Medicaid and 65%

say that Congress shouldn't cut its funding naturally.

So I don't quite understand this.

Why would the Trump administration, knowing this political equation, make this such a big part of the bill and see so much cutting in Medicaid and ignore these people's needs?

First of all, it speaks very clearly to the ability of Trump to force many Republican members to vote against their own perceived political self-interest and that of their constituents.

In next year's political midterm elections, you may see some members, Republican members in competitive districts, of which there are fewer and fewer in America, who actually lose their seats as a result of this vote.

But even more, big picture, I think it speaks to a partisan moment in which the label of your party being affixed to a bill is so significant for these elected officials that it essentially overwhelms all other considerations.

Let's be clear that Donald Trump explicitly promised not to cut Medicaid.

And as

recently, as the day before the bill's final passage, he was reportedly telling members of Congress in an Oval Office meeting that there were no Medicaid cuts in it.

And I think, Susan, there's also the fact, correct me if I'm wrong, that voters won't feel the real impacts of these Medicaid cuts until after the midterms.

Right.

It is a very political bill, and what they have done is front-loaded the benefits to people of tax cuts, for example, and tried to push off and delay the cuts that would affect people.

But it's something really unusual.

And it seems to defy certain conventions, even of our dysfunctional politics.

And that.

Totally.

I've just looked I just talked to Janet Yellen.

And she, like you, said, look, this is a bill most of all directed toward cutting taxes for wealthy people.

So how does the politics add up for Donald Trump?

Yeah, I think it speaks to a theory of the case in which even economic self-interest is subordinated to partisan and tribal loyalty.

So they're counting on these voters not to abandon them, even if they screw them.

That's number one.

Number two, the primacy of the culture war.

This is a Republican Party that

now believes, I guess, that they can convince people of anything.

And maybe that's true, by the way.

I do think there's a strand in the Republican Party that we're having trouble kind of fully processing, perhaps.

It's the Joni Ernst Dan Patrick, we're all going to die.

So, what the hell strand of the Republican Party?

1.4,

they are not eligible, so they will be coming off.

So,

people are not dying.

Well, we all are going to die.

Explain that.

Well, that maybe, you know, suffering is required in order to carry out the Republican revolution.

I think we're still struggling with this, but I think it tells us about a new political reality in which the Trump White House has concluded that its voters, even if they are forced to bear some of the pain of this bill, will not abandon them because of other priorities such as partisan loyalty, tribal loyalty, and the culture war, the idea that Trump is on their side even if he's not on their side.

How do the sum total of the Doge experience and now the Big Beautiful bill, is this going to be regarded as a political accomplishment for his constituencies?

Is it going to raise his numbers and help the Republicans

in an election next year?

There certainly are indicators.

Of course, history suggests Democrats would be likely to fare better in the midterm elections almost regardless of this particular legislation and you know i think there may be individual components of it that you'll hear the trump white house tout for example no tax on tips things like that but the overall

package

suggests something that is not what americans broadly were clamoring for and it's not even what republicans were clamoring for i am struck by this fact that there was real pushback from many, many corners of the Republican coalition.

Conservative groups, deficit-cutting groups, they were all pushing and lobbying, and pretty aggressively, many industries that have been Trump-friendly businesses were also against this.

The healthcare industry, enormous lobbying cloud in Washington, against the measure, and it's still passed.

And I think that's speaking to a new politics where the Trump White House is so confident of its support from Republicans that they're overriding objections that in the past would have crippled or killed outright a bill like this.

If you're J.D.

Vance and cast a deciding vote in the Senate and you want to be president, was this a good day or a bad day for you?

You know, I think for J.D.

Vance, who comes from a part of Ohio that's going to be very affected by things like the Medicaid cuts, by things like rural health care, that this was at a minimum a political risk.

He had no choice but to take it, of course, because that's the job of a vice president in Trump's world, is to salute and say yes, sir.

Well, Vance himself said that the point of the bill is to fund ICE, to fund ICE.

Is that popular enough as a trade-off for health care?

Pretty amazing, pretty amazing argument.

I believe Vance also said the Medicaid cuts were quote unquote immaterial because

ICE was so much more important in his particular statement.

That's why we're seeing every day things like the militarized spectacle of masked, heavily armed agents in the streets of Democratic-run cities.

Those are images that may stir horror among Democratic viewers, but they actually

are designed to invoke the passion and kind of righteous fury of Republican voters.

But you would figure that he'd have one great supporter in this, and that would be the wealthiest man in the world.

But Elon Musk has said this bill is a disaster, but he now seems to be behaving against his own self-interest.

Every time he opens his mouth lately, Tesla Sock plunges, and he's got a lot of business in Washington.

One of the aspects of this Trump-Musk breakup that I think was so notable and somewhat undercovered was Trump saying the quiet part out loud here, openly threatening Musk with the revocation of his Pentagon contracts, of his billions of dollars, billions of dollars in federal spending that benefit Musk's many businesses, both not just the Tesla with the electric car subsidies, but most importantly, the space contracts from the Pentagon, the contracts for his boring company.

And Trump, you know,

maybe it's implicit in a lot of how Washington works, but rarely is it explicitly said because in the past, one would say that's illegal, that's improper.

Substantively, the fight between Musk and Trump, the falling out between Musk and Trump, is essentially the shattering of the idea that the Republican Party is the party of budget cutting and fiscal responsibility.

And that means that all those cuts, the elimination of basically America's entire

foreign aid program, for example, simply about cruelty because there's no fiscal rationale for it.

And this bill underscores that.

And I think that's really important for people to understand.

You know, they've just admitted essentially to the public there is no rational basis for these cuts.

There is no policy goal undergirding it.

The goal is cutting for its own sake.

We're in a sort of a frenzy of self-destructiveness.

The events have come at us so fast that I wonder after the passage of this bill

and the rollout of tariffs and so much else, what else Donald Trump has in store?

He's only really exhausted one-eighth of this second term, right?

Thank you for reminding us of that.

You're welcome.

What do you think is next?

What's around the corner?

I think we have to take Trump seriously as far as what are some of the things that he has said for a long time that he wants to do, that he's been stymied from doing.

So, one of the things,

because it's been a short amount of time that we haven't fully seen yet, is what is he planning to do with the personal power of the Justice Department and the FBI?

Because he went to great lengths essentially to politicize those entities to make sure that they were in the hands of personal loyalists.

He has threatened many, many of his political opponents with investigations, with prosecutions.

So I'm very, very nervous and curious to understand whether he will follow through on those threats now that he has people who appear to be much more willing to carry out those threats.

Second of all,

If he manages to hold on to both chambers of Congress, what could they do to make permanent this kind of Trumpian revolution in terms of the power of the presidency?

I think if you look at the template that people like Victor Orban have used in Hungary,

that's the risk factor that we face right now is that a compliant Republican Congress, essentially a Supreme Court that increasingly appears to be not just a conservative majority on paper, but actually a Trump majority in reality, that if Trump, the Supreme Court, and that Republican Congress can change our political system in a more long-lasting way.

That's my fear.

Since we started out talking about economics, I'd like to end with that too.

One of the things that we're now hearing is that Trump very much would like to get rid of Jerome Powell as the head of the Fed.

Anybody panicking about that in Washington?

Yeah, I think.

We are the boiled frog, David.

We are almost panic immune at this point in the same way that Donald Trump has,

I think, inoculated much of America against facts in our political debate.

Even inside of Washington, there's so many individual crises at any one time.

It's very, very hard in Trump 2.0 to focus on any one of them.

The campaign against the Fed share and the independence of the Fed is something that Donald Trump has carried over from his first term.

He inveyed against his own appointee.

Let's underscore that he was his own appointee.

Janet Yellen actually might have been not a terrible fit on paper, but of course he didn't like the optics.

And Donald Trump is all about the optics.

So he didn't want to keep Janet Yellen because she was Barack Obama's chair of the Fed.

So he found in Powell someone who seemed like he would carry on more or less those policies.

But

he quickly soured on Powell, as with many of his first term appointees.

Powell had been adamant that he would fight Donald Trump to the last penny of his very considerable fortune.

Powell is a wealthy man, in order to preserve the independence of the Federal Reserve.

Many, many experts consider the idea of an independent central bank to be core to.

How'd you go about finding that?

Well, I mean, it would end up being a lawsuit.

And there are real questions with this Supreme Court.

One of the things I'm worried about is that in the next term of the Supreme Court, we could see rulings that erode or eliminate altogether the independence of some of these independent federal agencies that have been around since the New Deal.

And then we're talking about

a different America, I think.

Susan Glasser writes our column, Letter from Trump's Washington, and she's co-author with Peter Baker of The Divider, a best-selling book about Donald Trump's first term.

I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for joining us this week.

See you next time.

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