White House economists boasted Wednesday that President Trump’s tax, infrastructure, and trade policies will return economic growth to around 3 percent annually, closer to the normal for past decades, President Trump’s top economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Wednesday.
“We have a high confidence that our policies will return growth levels to normal,” said Hassett, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, speaking with reporters Wednesday ahead of the release of the annual Economic Report of the President.
In the 568-page report, Hassett and Trump’s other economists projected that annual Gross Domestic Product growth would average 3 percent over the next 10 years if the full White House agenda is phased in.
Without those policies, the report suggested, growth would instead average just 2.2 percent — slower than the postwar average and a reflection of what would be expected under President Obama’s policies, Hassett said.
“We’ve restored economic policies to where a sensible, rational country would put them,” he told reporters.
He rejected the idea, put forward by Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and other economists, that the economy has entered an era of “secular stagnation” or a “new normal” of slower, more fragile growth.
The report defended the new tax law, and called for making its provisions permanent. It also made the economic case for Trump’s priorities, including regulatory relief, infrastructure spending, trade renegotiations, and healthcare changes.
Many believe growth is expected to be slower than in decades past is because of slowing population growth and the aging of the Baby Boom generation.
But the administration is “dedicated to ending the low labor force participation rate inherited from the previous administration, and to uplifting our nation’s communities that have borne the highest costs of bad policies, in the forms of poverty, despair, and drug addiction,” the report said. It warned of a “silent nation of Americans who have dropped out of the workforce.”
Among the proposals to bring people back into the workforce are reforming safety net programs and instituting paid leave.
