The White House on Sunday dismissed “doom-mongering” from former Treasury Department Secretary Larry Summers and other critics of President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after the president signed it last week.
“I think that there’s been a lot of — a lot of doom-mongering, a lot of scare-mongering. And this isn’t the first time, by the way. During the president’s first term, lots of folks said that the president’s historic tariffs on China during the first term were going to be terrible for the economy,” Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” when criticism of the bill from Summers was noted.
“And there was no lasting evidence of that whatsoever. There was no meaningful economic inflation, no meaningful economic slowdown. Everything was actually pretty OK in response to the tariffs last time,” he added, in a clip highlighted by Mediaite.
Summers made an appearance on “This Week” just prior to Miran and said the Trump megabill would result in “more inflation, more risk that the Fed has to raise interest rates and run the risk of recession, more stagflation,” posing a “risk” to “every middle-class family in our country.”
“And for what? A million dollars over 10 years to the top tenth of a percent of our population. Is that the highest priority use of federal money right now? I don’t think so,” Summers said. “This is a shameful act by our Congress and by our president that is going to set our country back.”
Trump on Friday signed the “big, beautiful bill,” resulting in an extension of the 2017 tax cuts and phase-in cuts to Medicaid, overcoming a significant legislative hurdle that had dogged the president and Congress for months.
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