Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a Breitbart News “State of the Economy” policy discussion that economists have underestimated President Donald Trump’s economic policies because they tend to stick with the status quo and have failed to anticipate what is happening in the economy.
Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle asked Bessent why economists had significantly underestimated the latest jobs number, noting that the reported figure of 162,000 was nearly three times the roughly 55,000 expected by economists.
“I think it’s been a long time since you’ve seen something like this before. They like to hug the status quo. Economists, myself included, are not exciting people, right?” Bessent said.
“So, you know, they want to stay in, and I think there’s no imagination in terms of what we are seeing,” he continued.
Bessent pointed to manufacturing as an example.
“Because one of the Democrats in Congress said, ‘Oh, you promised a manufacturing boom, and there’s no manufacturing boom.’ Well, you know, Representative, it’s only been six months,” Bessent said.
“Like, I wish I could snap my fingers and have a new factory go up, but I can tell you what is happening. What’s happening is — like in my hometown in Charleston, South Carolina — Boeing decides that they’re going to increase the Dreamliner production by 50 percent, and you start out with construction jobs,” he continued.
“So now we’re seeing booming construction jobs, and that’s kicking into the manufacturing jobs,” Bessent added.
Breitbart News economics and finance editor John Carney said the shift from constructing manufacturing facilities to working in them is already beginning.
“We’re already starting to see the beginning of that, the shift from building to working in the plant,” Carney said. “So if you look at the job openings number, there are 400,000 open manufacturing jobs in the United States, and we are — and for the first time in years, we are actually adding manufacturing to payrolls right now.”
“I think that’s one of the reasons people underestimate, to answer Matt’s question — is because a lot of people didn’t believe that we could revive manufacturing,” Carney continued.
“Yeah, I think that’s exactly it,” Bessent responded. “Because if you look at the last two years of the Biden administration, I think manufacturing jobs — we lost about 200,000 manufacturing jobs, and then kind of the momentum from those losses, the first — it’s back to stabilizing the patient.”
“We got those losses down substantially, and now we’re coming out on the other side,” he continued. “And this is just something that we haven’t seen in so long.”
Carney then raised what Bessent has called “reprivatizing the U.S. economy.”
“I think another thing that people are missing is the value of what you have called reprivatizing the U.S. economy,” Carney said. “And just in the labor market, we have shrunk federal payrolls significantly, and actually putting those — but it hasn’t increased unemployment. These people are not winding up without work; they are moving to the private sector, which is actually becoming more productive as we move people out of government work into the private sector.”
Bessent responded with the example of the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base.
“I remember when I was a kid, there was an Air Force base near us, and I can’t remember the name, but there was a commission that shut down a lot of military bases around the country,” Bessent said.
“Right, and it was doom and gloom, and ‘You can’t close the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. It’ll do this.’ You know what? They closed the Air Force base. There’s a gigantic new airport there now. It’s the gateway to, like, this gigantic tourist mecca,” he continued.
“All that land got privatized. It’s housing. It’s business. And that’s what we’re like. That is like a small example of what we’re doing now,” Bessent said.
He also addressed reductions in the federal workforce.
“Well, how would we function without all these other employees, government employees? Really well,” Bessent said. “And a lot of it is just going back to where we were pre-COVID.”
“At the IRS, I think we’ve taken employees down by about 20,000. That just gets us back to where we were,” he continued.
“Collections are up, penalties and large settlements are up, and we’re able to use technology,” Bessent said.
Bessent concluded by previewing an upcoming government initiative.
“I think that the U.S. government has been so unproductive,” Bessent said. “I think you’re going to see something next week from the government.”
“We’re going to unveil something that’s just going to light up the way Americans think about interacting with the government in a very modern, interactive way,” he added.
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