Hassett Opens Up On Harris And Biden Economy Lies 

During an interview on PBS’ “Firing Line” with Margaret Hoover that aired Friday, Kevin Hassett, former senior adviser to Donald Trump and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for her remarks during this week’s presidential debate.

Hassett took issue with Harris’ assertion that the Biden-Harris administration had to clean up the economy after Trump’s presidency, accusing her of rewriting history regarding the U.S. economy’s recovery under Trump.

“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. 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.”

Hassett argued that the U.S. recovery was largely driven by actions taken by both Democrats and Republicans in 2020, while Trump was still president. He noted that bills passed during that period 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.”