Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday pushed back on concerns that have been raised about tariffs causing inflationary pressures that raise consumer prices, saying they would just lead to a one-time “price adjustment.”
Bessent delivered remarks at the Economic Club of New York and participated in a question-and-answer period with FOX Business Network’s Larry Kudlow in which he was asked whether tariffs are inflationary.
“Look, can tariffs be a one-time price adjustment? Yes… I would hope that the failed team transitory could get back together and think that nothing is more transitory than tariffs if it’s a one-time price adjustment,” Bessent said in reference to Biden administration officials saying that the historic inflation of several years ago was “transitory.”
“And for those who say, ‘oh, the tariffs are a tax, they’re inflationary,’ so you’re saying taxes are inflationary, which I like to challenge a lot of my Democratic friends to,” he added.
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Bessent also said that the Trump administration’s economic policy is taking the entire government into account and noted that mortgage rates have declined along with crude oil prices since the president’s election win and his subsequent inauguration, so he isn’t worried about inflation overall.
“The economic program is a whole of government, holistic program, and I think that we could get a one-time price adjustment,” Bessent said, adding that “across the continuum, I’m not worried about inflation.”
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Bessent discussed how Trump’s tariffs are intended to reorient the international economic system “to advance the interest of the American people” to keep the U.S. from “subsidizing the world’s underspending in defense” and serving as “a consumer of first and last resort… absorbing excess supply in the face of insufficient demand in other countries’ domestic models.”
“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Bessent said. “The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility and economic security.”
He went on to say that tariffs will create an opportunity to reexamine multilateral trade deals and aspects of international economic relations “that do not work for the American people.”
“This is what tariffs are designed to address — leveling the playing field such that the international trading system begins to reward ingenuity, security, rule of law and stability, not wage suppression, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, non-tariff barriers and draconian regulations,” Bessent said.
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