Justin Wolfers teaches economics 101 at the University of Michigan. It’s an introductory course about supply, demand, and trade. The basics. He wishes President Donald Trump attended.
Wolfers, an Australian known for his research on how happiness relates to income, is one of the more prominent economists speaking out against Trump’s sweeping tariffs. He says they not only betray the most basic laws of economics, but could very well tip the US into a completely avoidable recession.
In early April, Trump announced a series of tariffs not seen in the US since the Depression era. The plan roiled the stock market, unsettled the bond market, and is resulting in an unprecedented global trade war. A week later, Trump backed off—somewhat—by announcing a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, but remained in the grip of an ever-escalating tit-for-tat with China, with no end in sight.
Trump has always argued that tariffs are needed to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, which have been declining for half a century. But Wolfers says the president’s vision is misguided and steeped in fantasy. Even if the US can claw back manufacturing power in the future, he says, it will be dominated by automation and robotics, not humans.
“What we have here is an economic policy that’s fundamentally driven by nostalgia,” Wolfers says. “This is not how you rebuild the middle class.” He doesn’t know what the future of work will look like in the US but adds: “What I want to do is trust that people will make their own damn choices.”
On this episode of More To The Story, Wolfers sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why today’s tariffs are markedly different from the ones Trump imposed in 2018, the likelihood that the US tips into a recession, and ultimately how Trump’s tumultuous tariff plan might affect you.
Dig Deeper
Read: Democrats Grill Officials on Insider Profits From Trump’s Tariff Reversal (Mother Jones)
Read: Trump’s Trade War Is Here and Promises to Get Ugly (Mother Jones)
Listen: Trump’s Deportation Black Hole (Reveal)
Listen: Think Like an Economist
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Fact checker: Serena Lin | Digital producers: Nikki Frick and Artis Curiskis | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Transcript
More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for More To The Story is the audio.
| Justin Wolfers: | Uncertainty right now is through the roof. No one knows what’s going on. Business confidence is in the floor. Consumer confidence is in the floor. As a CEO, I’d be like, “It’s got to be the case that right now, there’s so much uncertainty, I’m better off just waiting a bit.” |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. |
| Justin Wolfers: | If that’s the case, they’re not building factories. We’re not spending money. There’s actually a word for that. They’re not making stuff, and we’re not spending. It’s called a recession, and I want to add something. It didn’t have to be this way. |
| Al Letson: | On this week’s More To The Story, when will the chaos end as Trump’s brute force tariff agenda upends the global economy? I sit down with Justin Wolfers, one of the best economists today at explaining what the biggest tariff shock in US history means for you, and whether it will push the country into an entirely avoidable recession. Stay with us. |
| Al Letson: | This is more to the story. I’m Al Letson, and I bet that you, like me, have been asking some increasingly-urgent questions about the economy lately. Maybe you’ve been looking at your retirement savings, or rethinking a summer vacation, or just buying groceries and wondering, how long will this economic upheaval last? Just two weeks ago, President Trump unveiled a sweeping wave of tariffs that roiled the stock market and plunged consumer confidence. A week later, Trump reversed himself by announcing a 90-day pause on many of those tariffs, but he continued to engage in an escalating trade war with China. |
| Al Letson: | Trump argues that these moves are necessary to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, but economists across the board disagree. Many of them now are worried that the US could fall into a recession, including our guest today. Justin Wolfers has been sounding the alarm as much as anybody about what he sees as an economic emergency, and how should I introduce you? What would you like me to say when we- |
| Justin Wolfers: | Probably, I’d start with boyish good looks. |
| Al Letson: | Boyish good looks. Got it. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Move on to Australian charm. |
| Al Letson: | Uh-huh. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Or you could just start, I’m a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. |
| Al Letson: | The last few weeks have been, I don’t know, absolutely crazy. We’ve never seen anything like this before. As an economist, how are you getting your head around this? |
| Justin Wolfers: | My role in the world is different from yours. This is my turn to step forward. I think that the world economy is tumultuous. It’s tumultuous, and it’s shaping people’s lives in dramatic ways. My role is to help them better understand it. I’m going to rely on you, Al, to tell me what it is folks need to know, and I’m here to help. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I’m curious, as a teacher, what are you telling your students? This must be a great time and also the worst time, but really a great time to teach students about exactly how economics work and how it doesn’t work. |
| Justin Wolfers: | It’s an amazing time. I don’t think there’s ever been a sharper lesson in the importance of economics. No one’s saying to me, “Why are you drawing those lines on the board, Professor Wolfers?” They’re seeing how it shapes their lives, and actually, one of the many threads through the current plot is we have a president who didn’t understand the lessons of the exact class I teach, which is Economics 101. It shows the students what we’re doing in class is about the world. It is about your life, and the stakes are high. |
| Al Letson: | When I talk to people about tariffs, even before the president enacted his plan, I think a lot of people were just kind of of the belief that he wasn’t actually going to do it, like he talked a lot about it, but he wasn’t going to see it through. The point that I would bring up to them is that, well, in his first term, he actually did do it. It’s just he didn’t do it on the scale he’s doing it now, and I think the scale is what’s really shaking the economy. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Yes. So the president did, in fact, implement a bunch of tariffs and turn parts of the economy on their head in their first term, but it is fundamentally different, the scale. The most obvious thing that happened was there was a tariff on washing machines. It’s a really nice case study, because it explains … This time, we’re moving from tariff on washing machines to everything. The tariff was about a hundred bucks. The price of imported washing machines rose by about a hundred bucks. You might say to yourself, “Well, that’s not a problem. I’ll just buy an American-made washing machine.” But the first thing that Whirlpool and Maytag did, as soon as they realized Samsung had raised their prices by a hundred bucks, you know what the American washing machine manufacturers did? |
| Al Letson: | They raised their prices by a hundred bucks. |
| Justin Wolfers: | That’s right, and here’s the crazy part. There was a tariff on washing machines but not dryers. Do you know what happened to the price of dryers? |
| Al Letson: | They raised their price by a hundred bucks. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Isn’t that amazing? So the point, though, is that the tariff on imported goods shapes the prices of even the goods made by Americans and other goods. |
| Al Letson: | Right. |
| Justin Wolfers: | And so that’s what happened in the first term. |
| Al Letson: | So take that washing machine story and multiply it by how many? |
| Justin Wolfers: | By every single thing you buy. That’s what’s changing this time, and so it’s hard to summarize all that. But the way we economists do it is we add up all the things that the United States trades, and we figure out a weighted average of all those tariff rates. Before President Trump came to power, the average tariff rate charged on Americans importing goods was about 1.5%. In his first term, he doubled that to 3%. This term, he’s raised the average tariff rate up to 32%, which was the highest in the world, higher than the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs of the Depression era. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Then, the big backdown that came last Wednesday was lauded as being a pause on tariffs, but it wasn’t. It only paused the craziest of the tariffs. It, in fact, increased the tariff rate on China. And so the average tariff rate today is about 25%. I want to pause, just, and emphasize how high that is. That means we’re second in the world behind Bermuda, slightly above the Solomon Islands, Belize, Chad, Gabon. I’m going to say something that’s going to sound like too much math. The pain that a tariff causes rises with the tariff rate, but it rises with the square of the tariff rate. All right. That sounds like a lot. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I took general math three times, so you’re going to have to break that down for me. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Yeah. So I’m going to make it real easy for you, Al. The thing about a small tariff is small times small equals small. |
| Al Letson: | Sure. |
| Justin Wolfers: | That’s why they didn’t hurt too much in 2018. This time, we have big tariffs. Remember, I said the average tariff rate is 25%. Well, big times big is really big. So I’ve done the math for you on the back of my envelope, and roughly speaking, it looks like the cost of this set of tariffs, the pain they will cause is 50 times larger than in the first term. That’s why you have financial markets freaking out, and, in fact, it’s the largest tariff shock in the history of the United States. |
| Al Letson: | Does that mean that Americans are just going to stick to the essentials, like the things that you actually have to use to live your life? You will pay the bump in price, but the stuff that you can wait on or the stuff that if you wanted to wait on a new car, if you … I mean, right now, in my house, I need a new AC unit. The one that I have will probably get me through the summer. I live in Florida. It will hopefully get me through the summer, but I am weighing out, what do I do if the prices skyrocket like that? |
| Justin Wolfers: | Right. So I’m just like you, and for me, it’s not an AC unit. We don’t have a second car, and I live in Michigan, where you need to drive to get anywhere. So what am I doing? Here, it’s really important to understand something. This is a White House that changes its mind every second day. So I know the price of cars right now is really high because there’s a 25% tariff on cars. I kind of think there might be some chance, a point at which he changes his mind. If this price was higher forever, I’d probably pay the price. But I reckon maybe car prices might come back down, so I’m doing without. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Then, realize what I’m doing with my car, putting it off, and you’re doing with your air conditioning unit, gee, if a whole bunch of families are thinking the same way, what’s that going to do to spending through the rest of 2025? It’s not just you, and me, and other households. Let’s now say, Al, that you are the CEO of a major corporation. Your staff has been doing work on an expansion plan. You’ve got a successful business and a successful product, and they say, “Hey. Here’s our plans for the new factory. Are you ready, boss, for us to break ground?” Uncertainty right now is through the roof. No one knows what’s going on. Business confidence is in the floor. Consumer confidence is in the floor. As a CEO, I’d be like, “I like these plans. I want them to work, but gee. It’s got to be the case that right now, there’s so much uncertainty, I’m better off just waiting a bit.” |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. |
| Justin Wolfers: | If that’s the case, they’re not building factories. We’re not spending money. There’s actually a word for that. They’re not making stuff, and we’re not spending. It’s called a recession. And so that’s how this current moment might transition into a recession, and I want to add something. It didn’t have to be this way, but when you do tariffs in this utterly ad hoc, chaotic way, that’s what causes all the problems. Having tariffs that last forever, that might lead someone to open a new factory, but having tariffs that might be there today and gone tomorrow, given that, I’m not going to start the new factory. So that means we’re going to get all the costs of the tariffs but none of the benefits. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, Wolfers discusses why Trump’s tariff approach is markedly different this time around and what he would say to the president if he had his ear. |
| Justin Wolfers: | So my plea to the president, and this would literally end all the madness right away, is call any three random economists out of the phone book. If three out of three say, “Stop this madness,” then he should stop. If you can even find one out of the three that doesn’t, I will admit that I’m wrong, but I’m not. |
| Al Letson: | We have a lot more to talk about with Justin, but first, there’s obviously a lot of economic uncertainty out there. But Reveal only exists because of the financial support from our listeners. We’re a nonprofit, and our journalism is listener-supported. So if you can, consider donating. Just go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift. Okay. Don’t go anywhere. There’s more to the story. |
| Al Letson: | It’s More To The Story. I’m Al Letson, and I’m back with economist Justin Wolfers. The Trump Administration is saying that they are imposing these tariffs, and somehow, magically, factories are going to open up in the United States, and American workers are going to get back into the business of manufacturing. As a journalist, I know that we just don’t have the infrastructure, but also, they’re saying that Americans will go and work in those factories. I don’t know. As somebody that’s been doing journalism for a long time and talking to people across the country, I don’t think that those two things that they are speaking as truth are actually true. As an economist, what’s your take on it? |
| Justin Wolfers: | Yeah. So there’s actually two questions there, will we get manufacturing to return, and do we want this to happen? Imagine you’re the CEO of a major company. You’re trying to decide whether to build your next sneaker factory in the United States or elsewhere. The United States has incredibly talented workers, but very high wages. President Trump says, “Well, I’ll impose tariffs so that people will still buy American-made sneakers rather than those from abroad. We’ll try and give Americans a cost advantage.” |
| Justin Wolfers: | I might kind of be interested at this point, but this comes back to the chaos point, which is as I’m thinking about building my factory, I realize my factory is going to take three years to build, and it will then be in operation for several decades. The most important number for that set of plans is not today’s tariff rate. It’s what I expect the future tariff rate to be between about 2028 and 2058. Al, what do you expect the future tariff rate to be? |
| Al Letson: | I have no idea. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Right. So we have a politician who’s going to hit term limits. So we’re absolutely certain if it’s a Democratic president, the tariffs are gone. We’re also sure that there’s half of the Republican Party, the old half, that was profoundly against tariffs. We know that Trump has not bothered to go through Congress and put these into law, so these tariffs could go away at any point in time. In fact, Trump is already saying, “Oh. The tariffs aren’t going to stay on. I’m going to negotiate a deal.” So given that, most people I talk to say, “Well, I don’t expect high tariffs in the future. I just know they’re here today.” Given that, it’s not going to bring the factories home. That’s the sense in which we’re not going to get any of the benefit. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Now, let me come back and say, do we want to spend this much effort trying to bring factory jobs back? One really, really important point to make here is American workers are incredibly productive. One of the reasons we’re productive is we’re highly educated, and we work very well with complex machinery. When you have high-wage workers, which is what we have, and high-education workers, which is, again, in a global setting, what we have, what a factory will look like is a whole lot of robots. So if you’ve walked into an American manufacturing plant in recent decades, there are not thousands of people clocking in in the morning and clocking out. There’s dozens, and those dozens of people are feeding thousands of machines. |
| Justin Wolfers: | And so the future of manufacturing is robots, but this isn’t going to bring jobs back home for us. In fact, American manufacturing output is at all-time high. It’s American manufacturing employment that’s not, and that’s because robots, not cheap foreign labor, robots have taken away the jobs that many people remember from the mythical 1950s. This is not how you rebuild the American middle class. That’s the problem here. Look, there’s a deeper issue. The economy’s actually pretty good right now. I should be clear. I’m talking to you in early April 2025. I can’t promise it’s going to be true by May. |
| Al Letson: | Sure. |
| Justin Wolfers: | But it’s pretty good right now, and most American, nearly every American who wants a job can find one. Unemployment’s very low, four point something percent. That means if we’re going to have more manufacturing jobs, the only way to do that is by having fewer of other jobs. So what do you think we want to take Americans out of doing in order for them to work inside manufacturing? Because you have to answer that question, and you have to answer it in a way that, does that end up leaving those people better off or worse off? |
| Justin Wolfers: | What we have here is an economic policy that’s fundamentally driven by nostalgia. Here’s the nostalgia. Trump grew up in the 1950s. American manufacturing was a powerhouse that lifted American wealth and the American middle class and a very, very important part of our economic development. Funny thing is during the 1950s, we were moving from the farm to the factory, and the same arguments we’re having today, is it okay to hollow out manufacturing, we were having back then, is it okay to hollow out farms? The story of farming isn’t that we gave up farming. It’s that we got so good at it, so productive, and we used so many machines that it only takes a tiny fraction of Americans working the land to feed all of us. And so that’s what then freed up enough people they could move to the factories. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Now, it turns out the factories today are so productive, and so mechanized, and so many robots that we’re freed up to go and work on other things. And so what we want is an America in which we use the unique American skills, and relative to the rest of the world, this is the most highly-educated population. We have the world’s best engineers. We have software developers. We have all sorts of incredible high-tech going on. And so what we’re seeing is a movement from the factories to this cognitive work, this creative work, and people are a little nostalgic. But I tell you what, sitting at a desk all day is actually kind of a lot easier on your body than working in a factory. |
| Justin Wolfers: | And so I don’t know the right set of jobs for the United States to have. What I want to do is trust that people will make their own damn choices, and I’m not going to push them into a factory if they don’t want to be there. When you talk to manufacturing workers, look at surveys. It’s amazing that there are all these wealthy people who say, “Oh. I bet what the middle class want is more manufacturing jobs.” It’s simply not true. |
| Al Letson: | No. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Folks who work in manufacturing want their kids to grow up and work in the knowledge economy. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I mean, the memes that are going around now of Americans putting together iPhones just really kind of crystallize the whole idea, is that you’re not going to see that in America. It’s just not going to happen, because Americans don’t, by and large, want those jobs. |
| Justin Wolfers: | One view of economics is we have to figure out how to allocate all the world’s tasks. So someone’s got to design iPhones, write software for them, write operating systems, do the engineering sketches, design the robots that will build them, and then, someone’s got to build them. Which set of jobs would you rather have? It turns out that what we’re doing right now is we’re doing all the design, engineering, creative, and knowledge work in the United States, because that’s the workforce we have. The screwing the screws into the phone is being done in China, because China has an enormous number of workers who don’t have that knowledge economy skill set. As a result of that, we get cheap iPhones, and they get access to a technology they wouldn’t otherwise have had. We’re both better off. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. It’s an exchange. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Yeah. |
| Al Letson: | So that leads me into my next question. Could you explain this for me, because Trump seems very focused on trade imbalances. Can you tell me about those and why he cares so much about that? |
| Justin Wolfers: | So it turns out that when … The United States, for instance, we buy more stuff from China than China buys from us. Economists call that a trade deficit. Right? Because it’s between two countries, China and the United States, we call it a bilateral trade deficit. But notice, I really want you to notice here, we send China more dollars than they send us. China sends us more stuff, more t-shirts, more iPhones, more salt and pepper shakers, more lamps, more couches, more refrigerators than we send them. So our trade deficit in dollars is a trade surplus in stuff. Let me tell the story another way. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. |
| Justin Wolfers: | What is a bilateral trade deficit is when I’m spending more with someone than they’re spending with me. So the problem is Trump calls that a profit and loss statement, but it’s not. So I go to Trader Joe’s to buy my family’s groceries. Every week, I walk in there, and I spend, say, a hundred dollars on groceries. So I buy a lot of stuff from them. On the way out of the store, I say to them, “Hey. By the way, I’m really good at delivering economics lectures. Would you like to buy any economics lectures from me?” For some reason, they always say no. So I have a trade deficit with Trader Joe’s. |
| Justin Wolfers: | So if I were Trump, I would say, “That’s terrible. Trader Joe’s is ripping me off. Why does Trader Joe’s have such incredible protection and tariffs, and why is it screwing me?” But it’s not. I pay them a hundred bucks for food. They give me a hundred bucks worth of food back. Fortunately, I’m lucky that on another day, day Monday through Friday, I go into the University of Michigan, my employer, and I say to them, “Hey. Would you like to buy some economics lectures?” and they say yes. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Now, I have a trade surplus with the University of Michigan, because I buy none of their stuff. I occasionally buy a baseball cap to support the football team, but I have an enormous trade surplus with them. That’s how it is with the United States. And so this idea, that trade deficit, some of my friends have said, “We should just call it a trade difference,” because the word deficit gets us thinking about budget deficits and all sorts of problems. It’s not a deficit. It’s a difference. These bilateral trade deficits have no meaning whatsoever, but they’re the things that drive Trump crazy. |
| Al Letson: | So this all feels very, just being honest, when you break it down like that, it feels pretty elementary and easy to understand. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Yes. |
| Al Letson: | Do the people around the president … Hold on. Let me think about how I want to word this. |
| Justin Wolfers: | No. I got the question, so let me just answer it. |
| Al Letson: | Go ahead. |
| Justin Wolfers: | President Trump’s misunderstanding is actually understandable. There’s lots of people who don’t understand economics. I have 18-year-olds who come into my Economics 101 class all the time, and they say, “Isn’t a bilateral trade deficit terrible?” Then, I teach them some economics, and then, at the end, they’re like, “Oh. That’s not a problem. Oh. That’s actually good. Oh.” They get it, and they move on with their lives. The problem is that President Trump hasn’t had that moment. It’s okay for him to be confused. What’s not okay is for it to be 50 years later in his life, 60, and to still be confused and have the view, “Well, if the entire economics establishment, literally every economist in North America, in the world thinks the economy operates one way, and I think it operates another way, it must be that they’re wrong and I’m right.” |
| Justin Wolfers: | The problem for the president, in the first term, he mostly hired grownups to be in the room. The grownups would say, “I understand you want to do this, Mr. President, but don’t.” That’s why we got some tariffs but not much. In the second term, he’s hired sycophants, and there’s no one in the room to tell him he’s getting it wrong. So my plea to the president, and this would literally end all the madness right away, is call any three random economists out of the phone book. If three out of three say, “Stop this madness,” then he should stop. If you can even find one out of the three that doesn’t, I will admit that I’m wrong, but I’m not. Listeners can’t see. Al looks a little confused right now, because Al’s saying, “Is it really possible that the economic policy of the global economy could all be run based on one mistake?” The answer is yes. |
| Al Letson: | So in one sense, it seems like maybe he listened a little bit to the markets, maybe he listened a little bit to some outside advisors who said to hold this off. But still, the 90-day hold causes a problem, because it still feeds into the instability. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Yes. So let me be clear, first of all. It’s only a fractional 90-day hold. He’s only taken about a quarter of the pain off the table. Most of it’s still there. So that, first of all, is very, very bad news. When he put that 90-day hold on, what was extraordinary was the extent to which financial markets were elated. They bid up the price of stocks by 9.5% in a single day, which, for your listeners, is just an extraordinary amount. It’s so big that it’s not just the tariffs. |
| Justin Wolfers: | I think what really happened is the world breathed a sigh of relief, “Phew. Thank goodness we’ve learned that the president, when staring straight down the barrel of a near-certain recession, will back off.” We were relieved to learn that, because it looked like he wasn’t. So the good news is he didn’t fully back his instincts. The bad news, as you say, is we’re stuck absolutely in limbo. So it’ll lead to a flurry of imports over the next few weeks. He’s given himself an off ramp, and I hope that he takes it. But the level of uncertainty about what you and I or business leaders can expect remains absolutely through the roof. |
| Al Letson: | Do you think the damage is already done? |
| Justin Wolfers: | A lot of it. I think there’s two forms of damage. There’s the short-run stuff, like, “Are you going to buy that air conditioner? Am I going to set up this factory?” But I think there’s a more profound problem, which is the United States has shown itself an unreliable ally and an unreliable trading partner. The world has learned that Trump is not to be trusted. No one’s learned that more directly than Canada, where in the first term, he arrived, started the trade war, and tore up a free trade deal only to rewrite the same free trade deal, but give it a new name, and then arrive again in the second term, tear up the free trade deal that he wrote, and then go back to it. Just whiplash. Right? |
| Justin Wolfers: | The second problem is the rest of the world, and this is where I think the American people are so important, the rest of the world has learned that Americans are willing to elect a leader who is comfortable overturning the global economy on a whim. We did this. This was done in our name. |
| Al Letson: | So what are the risks here? What kind of future are we looking at with all of these tariffs and economic uncertainty? |
| Justin Wolfers: | So there’s a short-term risk, which is we may be about to be pushed into a recession. It’s actually very hard right now for anyone to understand what economic forecasts mean. Because if you said to me, “Justin, is there going to be a recession?” my answer would be, “It depends.” So instead of answering your question that way, I’m going to invite you to ask two questions. Justin, if Trump walks away from all of this madness, this tariffs and so on, and runs a more orderly White House, what’s the chance of recession next year? My answer’s going to be about 25%, a one in four chance. If Trump pushes ahead with everything the way he announced it on Liberation Day, what are the chances that causes a recession? My estimate is about 75%. |
| Al Letson: | What if he does a mixture? What if it’s like what he’s doing right now? What if he just keeps the high tariff rate on China, which China, he seems to be obsessed with? |
| Justin Wolfers: | And so those two estimates I gave you, 25% and 75% are basically what happens if we’re all or nothing. If we end up halfway in between, the answer’s going to be halfway in between. That would be 50%. |
| Al Letson: | Last question. When do you think that Trump supporters in deeply-red states, Mississippi, Alabama, Idaho, Montana, when do you think they will feel the pain from these tariffs? |
| Justin Wolfers: | Tomorrow. Do you remember the story of your conditioner? |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Right? You’re a guy who wants to buy an air conditioner. You live in Florida. It’s hot. Your air conditioner’s on its last legs. You don’t really feel like you can afford to buy one right now. That story is going to play out in households all around the country tomorrow, today. It’s already happening. The latest consumer confidence numbers came out. They’ve never moved south as quickly as they just did. People’s fears about price rises have never moved north as fast as they just did. People understand that prices are about to rise in very, very painful ways. |
| Al Letson: | I would love to have you back when some of this settles. Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy, and he says he also has boyish good looks. We’ll go with that. |
| Justin Wolfers: | It’s not me who said that. Al, you said it. |
| Al Letson: | Oh. Excuse me, and he’s got boyish good looks. He’s great. |
| Justin Wolfers: | Thanks, man. |
| Al Letson: | Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. You can find him on Bluesky and X at @justinwolfers. If you like this conversation, you might be interested in our recent Reveal episode, Trump’s Deportation Black Hole, about the Trump administration’s use of a notoriously dangerous prison in El Salvador and how the White House is targeting hundreds of students and immigrants living in the US legally. |
| Al Letson: | We’ve been covering the hell out of these fast-moving stories, and we don’t want you to miss a thing. We’ll put a link to it in our show notes, and since you stayed all the way to the end, I know that you must appreciate what we do at Reveal. So sign up for our free newsletter by going to revealnews.org/newsletter, and we’ll send you the latest from our newsroom in a weekly email. This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGuirk-Allison. Our theme music and engineering by Fernando, “My man, yo,” Arruda and J Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this again next week. This is More To The Story. |