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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue with post-debate analysis including your calls and texts at 212-433-WNYC, but now only on the subject of inflation and other economy policies that we heard from the two candidates last night.

If you've been listening this week, you know we promised a specific look at the candidates on inflation and other economic issues as part of our coverage, not just who tried to get over on this one, who looked good, who sounded bad. We will do that now even though the internal Democratic Party reaction to Biden's debate performance has taken over most of the public conversation. With us now is Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post. Jeff, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jeff Stein: Brian, always a pleasure to be on. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Trump and Biden blamed each other for inflation getting so high, but I was looking for what they might say about their plans to control it better than the other guy in a second term. Here's CNN's Jake Tapper asking Trump about one of his signature policies.

Jake Tapper: You want to impose a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the US. How will you ensure that that doesn't drive prices even higher?

Donald Trump: It's not going to drive them higher. It's just going to cost countries that have been ripping us off for years like China and many others, in all fairness to China. It's going to just force them to pay us a lot of money, reduce our deficit tremendously, and give us a lot of power for other things. He made a statement. The only thing he was right about is I gave you the largest tax cut in history.

I also gave you the largest regulation cut in history. That's why we had all the jobs. The jobs went down and then they bounced back and he's taking credit for bounce-back jobs. You can't do that. He also said he inherited 9% inflation. Now, he inherited almost no inflation and it stayed that way for 14 months, and then it blew up under his leadership because they spent money like a bunch of people that didn't know what they were doing.

Brian Lehrer: Jeff, first of all, anything there to fact-check or what's the general expertise on tariffs and consumer prices?

Jeff Stein: Yes, there's so much there. It's almost hard to know where to begin. To start, at the end of what Trump said, the idea that the Biden spending was responsible for inflation is, I think, at least heavily contested. Most economists say that inflation accounted for 2% or 3% of the 9% inflation we saw. Every other developed country dealt with a bout of inflation after COVID.

In terms of the tariff question, Trump is wrong, [chuckles] to put it mildly, that there would not be any impact on consumer prices. Now, some economists who would agree with the potential benefits of tariffs would argue that eventually once you create more import restrictions, that domestic production scales up to the point at which these price spikes level out. In the short term, even people who support the tariffs, tend to acknowledge that they would lead to price spikes. I've talked to several of Trump's own White House economist from his first administration who told me, on the record, that inflation would go up due to the tariff proposals.

The tax part of this-- I mean it's truly every single piece of it. The tax piece of it, Trump was asked about his plans to deal with inflation. He said that he delivered the biggest tax cut. Might be obvious to point out, but inflation is driven in part by excess aggregate demand, too much spending in the economy. Tax cuts drive up inflation. If anything, that policy would push in the other direction. A lot of things to pick up.

Brian Lehrer: That was going to be the second Trump policy that I brought up because he celebrated in that clip and elsewhere in the debate the tax cut that came on his watch that economists also say will be inflationary if he renews it in a second term. Why would renewing the tax cuts be inflationary if the original round did not produce a lot of inflation until COVID?

Jeff Stein: That's a good question. I think the extent to which the tax cuts field inflation is hard to assess in part because we were in an environment where inflation largely was kept in check and low. We had a problem coming out of the great recession of 2008 where we had insufficient demand where people weren't spending enough. The tax cuts helped, in some regard, that spending demand, that stimulus demand, get injected into the economy. We did see, in 2019, pretty strong and robust growth, but it was the inflationary impacts that were held in check by the larger macroeconomic policy environment.

Now we're still struggling to get inflation down. I think actually the differences in the parties here is has the potential to be overstated when it comes to the inflationary impact of the tax cuts. Biden is proposing to keep the majority of the tax cuts that are set to expire, which are for people who earn under $400,000 a year. Really the inflationary impact on that part of the tax policy is probably negligible. Trump has talked about cutting corporate taxes even further, which would further fuel inflation in a way that Biden hasn't discussed. we didn't get a chance to hear Trump talk about that last night, though.

Brian Lehrer: One of the things that Biden takes credit for with respect to controlling inflation is controlling Medicare costs for seniors and yet when he brought that up, this resulted in his most notable brain glitch of the night. Here's that moment.

Joe Biden: Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with dealing with everything we have to do with-- Look, if we finally beat Medicare--

Brian Lehrer: I see you tweeted about that moment, Jeff. Do you want to take it on both the policy and debate performance level?

Jeff Stein: Yes. To address the policy for a second, during the Inflation Reduction Act deliberations, this was Biden's signature economic policy achievement, the White House pushed very hard for a cap on what seniors would pay for out-of-pocket expenses for certain prescription drugs. Really important policy deal affects tens of millions of people. They were only able, because of Republican opposition, to include in the final bill, a provision that capped those costs for certain drugs on Medicare.

What Biden wants to say here is that if Democrats are reelected, if he's reelected, that Democrats will extend this provision to everyone, not just people on Medicare. That's what he's trying to say. Every Democratic pollster I talk to and almost every Democratic official, is adamant that this is Democrats' single best policy issue. They tried really hard and made some headway, but not as much as they'd like, on lowering prescription drug costs for seniors.

Critical policy issue in the politics from Democrats' perspective could not be better. It's like on a T. Biden just swings the bat and hits the ground instead of the ball right in front of him on the T. It's an inexplicable bit of frustration for Democrats because this is the thing that they think is their number one message, maybe outside of abortion, against Trump, and they've worked so hard for it. Then Biden articulates it like that and it's staggering.

Brian Lehrer: Although, I think it is getting too much play as if that was representative of everything Biden said in the debate last night and yet it was that bad in the moment. CNN's Dana Bash asked Biden about Black voters and the economy specifically, given the persistent wealth and income disparities in the country. Let's listen to some of that.

Dana Bash: What do you say to Black voters who are disappointed with the progress so far?

Joe Biden: I say I don't blame them for being disappointed. Inflation is still hurting them badly. For example, I provided for the idea that any Black family first-time home buyers should get a $10,000 tax credit to be able to buy their first home so they can get started. I made sure that we're in a situation where all those Black families and those Black individuals who provided had to take out student loans that were ballooning that if they were engaged in nursing and anything having to do with volunteerism, if they paid their bills for 10 years on their student debt, all the rest was forgiven after 10 years. Millions have benefited from that. We're going to do a whole lot more for Black families.

Brian Lehrer: Here's part of Trump's response on that.

Donald Trump: He caused inflation as sure as you're sitting there. The fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he's allowed to come in through the border, they're taking Black jobs now. It could be 18, it could be 19, and even 20 million people, they're taking Black jobs and they're taking Hispanic jobs. You haven't seen it yet, but you're going to see something that's going to be the worst in our history.

Brian Lehrer: Any Black listeners, want to weigh in on who you think is better for the economy? You could pick up on the way Dana Bash framed the question. Do you think Biden underperformed relative to his promises on wealth and income disparity when he was running or who do you trust to close some of those economic racial gaps more in the next four years?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anyone else on substantive economic points from the debate last night, and if you learned anything about either candidate or started to think one or the other would be better or worse for the economy than you thought before the debate. With Jeff Stein, White House Economics correspondent for The Washington Post. Jeff, this was maybe a missed opportunity for Biden too because he did propose a big sweeping safety net bill, Build Back Better with childcare, eldercare, and housing items.

He didn't get it through Congress, but a lot of those things when you broke them out in the polls, were extremely popular. He didn't explicitly say, "Give me another term and a Democratic Congress and I'll get you those things." What do you think?

Jeff Stein: I feel like I'm going to disappoint you, Brian, and let you down today because I so commend the desire to be like, "Let's have a discussion about the policy substance." It's so sorely missing from so much of our national discourse, but even for someone like me who wants to just focus narrowly on the policy, it becomes really hard to disentangle the political [unintelligible 00:11:31] from all the substantive stuff that we wanted to discuss.

Even in that answer that Biden gave on helping Black Americans, his policy on the first-time home buyer credit, I know this is maybe a minor point, but it was strange to me that he said that it was for Black families. It's not what his proposal says. His proposal is for all families. Now, many Black people would benefit from that surely, but-

Brian Lehrer: Or disproportionately-

Jeff Stein: Or disproportionately, yes.

Brian Lehrer: -[unintelligible 00:12:05] because there are more Black families percentage-wise in those lower-income categories.

Jeff Stein: Totally. What Biden could have said is, or I think maybe what his campaign people had told him to say beforehand is, "Look, we have a plan that will provide an unparalleled subsidy for all Americans who have never bought a home before. That will disproportionately fix the racial wealth gap by allowing Black people to have a leg up into home ownership."

Then we could sit here and discuss the pros and cons of that idea which I have pros and cons about which to discuss, but that, it almost feels like a category error to have that conversation because it's not-- It seems like doing too much of a favor to the president to say, "Well, what he meant to say was this." and then to take it from there.

Brian Lehrer: Because it's not your job to bail him out.

Jeff Stein: Yes. Or even to say, "Well, the policy that he meant was this. Our job is to evaluate what the president said and there's a limit, I think, to how much we can put words in his mouth."

Brian Lehrer: That's where a lot of the tension lies this morning in the conversation. There's what the president said, there's a bad debate performance that everybody agrees he had, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's bad at governing. He does have policies, and I think it is our responsibility to articulate what those policies are because ultimately that's what's going to happen. One president or the other is going to try to put forth specific policies that are really different from each other.

Jeff Stein: I'll just say, and I don't want to dwell on this too long, but the people who I know who care most about these policies, the people who have worked often for decades in the trenches to get these things done, they're scared that their policies, that the things that they value are now at risk. I know that is still political theater and analysis. Why don't you steer me back to a policy question?

Brian Lehrer: Well, one policy question that didn't get explicitly asked last night that disappointed me that it wasn't there, I was saying all week, and I wrote in our newsletter yesterday that I wanted to hear an explicit housing policy question, an inflation on housing question. Which of you thinks you have a better way to control housing costs than your opponent? Because housing is arguably the number one affordability crisis point, crisis element for Americans today. When we talk about inflation, it's easy to think about grocery prices and other consumer goods like that, but it's housing that is stressing people so much. It's not just in New York, San Francisco, and places like that. It's in smaller cities too. We hear it all the time. They didn't do it.

Jeff Stein: Biden did get into that a little bit, the housing answer. Trump had no response to that as far as I could tell. Didn't bring it up. I haven't seen a housing policy from Trump. It's not typically an area of concern for the former president. In terms of Biden, he talked a little bit, as I said, about this home buyer credit. There's a pretty big debate among economists about whether this would be effective. It's continuing to spur demand in the housing market. Even though it gives people more spending capital, the downside would be that we already have too much spending capital going into the housing market, and it could likely drive prices up further and make people even more upset.

There's a big debate about that policy. Biden also I thought quite peculiarly mentioned that he wants to cap rents. This is a confused thing. Again, to give them credit perhaps, what Biden's administration has said they want to do is to look at some, I believe it's a small number of public housing units that the federal government has a share in and cap them, cap their rent increases. Now, that policy is also contested but there's some justifiable basis behind it.

Brian Lehrer: There's a [unintelligible 00:16:20].

Jeff Stein: People often in public housing are on fixed incomes or seniors, et cetera, et cetera. The way Biden portrayed it last night was like, "We're going to cap people's rents without any qualification or explanation." which made it sound like he was talking about the whole country, which is nothing the administration has ever put forward. Those were the moments on housing that stuck out to me.

Brian Lehrer: Well, progressives do have a national rent control proposal, but I don't think that's what Biden has signed onto, right?

Jeff Stein: No, the White House has been quite skeptical of the idea of a national rent control. Many even liberal economists will say that that-- I don't know if I agree with this, but they'll say that that discourages housing and building housing because you're reducing incentives for developers. Obviously, some progressives disagree with that, but the White House at least is very clear that it doesn't want to go there.

Brian Lehrer: Bailey in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bailey.

Bailey: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Bailey: My problem is that Trump keeps confusing African Americans with migrants and criminals. When he came to the Bronx for his little rally, he brought criminals on stage. Now he's saying that migrants are taking away African Americans' jobs, which means he really thinks that we are at the bottom. We do have less income than white people, but we are not working the fields of California in Texas. Also, I had text earlier, and this is bad, I know it's going to be controversial, is that I believe Kamala Harris is the liability right now for Biden because if he is elderly, because of racism and sexism in the United States, people are thinking if he dies she's going to be the president. Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Do you want the president to dump Harris because there is racism and sexism against the Black woman? It just [unintelligible 00:18:38] to that.

Bailey: I do not want Trump in office. Honestly, I'm a Black woman. I love her. I think she is very capable, but growing up as a black woman in the United States, I understand what racism and sexism is. I think that is the problem.

Brian Lehrer: Bailey, thank you very much for your call. Craig, in New Orleans, you're on WNYC. Hi, Craig.

Craig: Oh, that was very quick. I just got off the [chuckles] call with your screener. Yes. I was calling about the comments that you had about Trump and Biden's plans for the Black Americans. I am a Black New Orleanian, former New Yorker, and I found it really frustrating and disingenuous the comments that Trump made about immigrants taking jobs in one breath, and then in the very next breath, saying that immigrants were taking away Latinos' jobs who were the same group that he's trying to deport. How can he be the friend of a group and a foe in the same breath?

Then there's also just the issue that any and everything that Biden has been trying to do with student loan forgiveness, helping people get housing credits and you've got Republicans who are his allies who are working overtime to overturn and know anything that he's trying to scrap right through. I found the debate frustrating and turned it off because I couldn't listen to Trump's lies any longer. It would just be more ingenuous if we had discussions about real policies that they have put forward and then ask Trump to defend his record on some of the things that he has said and things that he's done and that can be easily and verifiably denied.

I just find this whole conversation very frustrating because it's just superficial right now. Biden looked bad, most of us can agree about that, but I still think on policy, he's got the right ideas and the approaches that are trying to move the country forward overall in a way that Trump is not.

Brian Lehrer: Craig, thank you for your call. Call us again. Last topic on economics and the debate. Social Security, it's CNN's Jake Tapper to Biden.

Jake Tapper: President Biden, if nothing is done to Social Security, seniors will see their benefits cut in just over 10 years. Will you name tonight, one specific step that you're willing to take to keep Social Security solvent?

President Biden: Yes. Make the very wealthy begin to pay their fair share. Right now, everybody making under $170,000, pays 6% of their income of their paycheck. Every single time they get a paycheck from the time the first one they get when they're 18 years old. I'm proposing that everybody, they pay-- Millionaires pay 1%. I would not raise the cost of Social Security for anybody under $400,000. After that, I begin to make the wealthy begin to pay their fair share by increasing from 1% beyond to be able to guarantee the program for life.

Brian Lehrer: Donald Trump.

Donald: But Social Security, he's destroying it because millions of people are pouring into our country and they're putting them onto Social Security. They're putting them onto Medicare, Medicaid, they're putting them in our hospitals. They're taking the place of our citizens.

Brian Lehrer: A specific policy difference there, Jeff, on taxing higher earners on more of their earnings for Social Security solvency, right?

Jeff Stein: Yes. Just another area where democratic officials were tearing their hair out because they think that there's such a clear, strong message here. Social Security does face the funding crisis. It will begin exhausting funds early next decade according to the latest government projections, but currently, what Democrats are pointing out is that basically that people's income-- See, it's even hard for me to articulate.

People's incomes above $143,000 a year are not subject to payroll taxes. What that essentially means is that it's a giant subsidy for higher-income people because as a proportion of their earnings, people who earn less than that are therefore taxed a lot less in terms of what goes to fund the Social Security Trust Fund. That issue has been something that Democrats and increasingly Biden, have seized on as something they can remedy and address to fix the overall Social Security funding shortfall. I feel like if you didn't know that background, you never would've understood Biden's answer but that's what he's trying to articulate. Trump's answer is no answer at all.

Trump doesn't even gesture in the direction of trying to figure out an answer to Social Security. He just says we're going to protect it and no changes will happen, which is just not true, but I think this just goes back to what I've been saying, it's just the frustration of Democratic officials who think they have a very clear message. For decades, Democrats have been the defenders of Social Security and Medicare, and in one night, I don't want to get hyperbolic or hysterical here, but Biden clearly was at a minimum not able to drive home the Democrat's advantage on those issues.

Brian Lehrer: One last fact check, and then we're going to be out of time, from the Trump answer that we just played. He said Biden's destroying Social Security because millions of people are pouring into our country and they're putting them onto Social Security. It's exactly the opposite because what we have in this country, what most of the Western industrialized countries and Eastern industrialized countries like Japan have, is a problem of too many retirees per worker.

Immigration, I think all the economic experts have said for decades and decades, immigration helps replenish the supply of young workers, not Social Security recipients. It helps replenish the supply of young workers as a ratio to Social Security recipients. A lot of immigration is actually good for Social Security solvency unless you disagree.

Jeff Stein: It was a particular galling falsehood, I think, last night from the President. Just as you're saying, just completely untrue to suggest that immigrants are the problem with Social Security. Only people who pay into the Social Security system can receive social security benefits. It is just part and parcel with the demagoguery of the former President against immigrants as he attempts to distract from his felonies and his corporate tax plans and many other things by turning almost every question into an answer about the threat that immigrants posed to this country that was, of course, founded by immigrants.

Brian Lehrer: Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post. Thanks a lot for joining us today.

Jeff Stein: Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Brian. Take care.

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