President Donald Trump criticized many figures in the establishment media on Tuesday for rushing to report a looming recession, despite an overall good economy throughout his presidency.
“I think the word ‘recession’ is inappropriate because it’s just a word that certain people, I’m going to be kind, certain people in the media are trying to build up because they’d love to see a recession,” Trump said. “We’re very far from a recession.”
The president commented to reporters at the White House that it was up to the Federal Reserve to keep growth going, pointing to their psychological impact on the economy.
“If the Fed would do its job, I think we would have a tremendous spur of growth,” he said.
He repeated his criticism of the Federal Reserve for engaging in quantitative tightening during his presidency, calling it a “very bad to do.”
“You have to be proactive,” he said, calling for another rate cut, pointing to the European Union and other countries cutting their interest rates.
“They have to do a rate cut,” he said, insisting that at a minimum the Federal Reserve should do nothing.
Trump said he was looking for any kind of tax cut, as part of his overall economic strategy, confirming that he had been thinking about indexing capital gains or pushing forward on a payroll tax.
“I would love to do something on capital gains, we’re talking about that, that’s a big deal, it goes through congress, [cutting] payroll tax is something that we think about and a lot of people would like to see that, and that very much affects the workers in our country and we have a lot of workers,” Trump said.
Trump said that many of his advisers supported the idea of indexing capital gains, as it was something he could do without Congress.
“Payroll taxes, I’ve been thinking about payroll taxes for a long time, whether or not we do it now or not — it’s not being done because of recession,” he said.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.