At the Economic Club of New York, the White House’s top economic adviser promised an AI-powered boom. The questions in the room kept returning to debt, borrowing costs and workers’ wages.
Listen to my immediate reaction from the event: At points, Kevin Hassett’s description of the economy felt like an alternative reality. I recorded this audio after hearing him make the case and watching how the room responded. Below, I check his claims against the latest published figures and policy documents.
Kevin Hassett came to the Economic Club of New York with a story about who gets to share in American growth. He began with communities that struggle to attract capital and with children who, he argued, should own a piece of the market from an early age.
Then the director of the White House National Economic Council described an economy that could grow at 4%, powered in part by artificial intelligence and rising productivity.
ONEST gives you the context behind the headline — from inside the rooms where some of those headlines are made. In this room, the questions kept pulling Hassett back from the future he envisioned to the costs and results of policies already in place.
Some of his starting points were sound. Hassett referred to work on distressed communities with a future Biden adviser. That adviser was Jared Bernstein, and their work helped shape the idea behind Opportunity Zones. But attracting investment to a place and showing that its residents shared in the returns are different tests.
Hassett also promoted Trump Accounts as a way to give children a stake in market growth. He spoke of 70 million accounts by the end of this month. The published IRS figure is far smaller: in a September 8 presentation, an agency official said it had received more than 7 million applications to open accounts. An application is not, by itself, evidence of a funded account.
