Stephen Moore criticized President Joe Biden’s target date for reopening the economy, insisting on Sunday that it is at least two months too slow.
Speaking on “The Cats Roundtable” radio talk show on WABC 770 AM hosted by John Catsimatidis, the ex-Trump economist said that “I disagreed with Joe Biden when he said the other night … that we’re going to have the economy open up by the Fourth of July so you can have parties with your family.”
Moore stressed that “we should have this economy opened up by the end of April, early May,” adding that “some states are already open. It seems that the president doesn’t realize that you’ve got half the states in the country that are pretty much fully open.”
He added that “the most important thing for the economy right now is getting the vaccine out there so we can open up this economy,” stressing that this is already happening as the vaccine is “getting out there at a very very rapid pace.”
Moore said that he was optimistic about the overall state of the economy, saying, “As we get back to normal, I think you’re going to see a really nice recovery. Consumers are going to spend. You’re already seeing signs of airports being more crowded. Stores being more crowded. We may even see movie theaters start to reopen. We may even see cruise ships starting to run again.”
He cautioned, however, that “I do think New York is going to face some tough times over the next years to get back,” as well as other large metropolitan centers such as Chicago.
“It’s going to take some time for these cities to recover from the mismanagement and the lockdowns and the violence as well,” Moore said, stressing that “I’m not quite sanguine about the recovery of New York, but I think it will happen.”
Moore did express concern about inflation, saying “I laugh when I hear the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell saying, I don’t see any inflation out there. He must not go fill up fill up the tank. He must not go to the grocery store.”
Moore said that “I don’t think we’re going to have runaway inflation like we saw in the 1970s. But look at the gas prices. I paid over $3 a gallon this week for gas, and it seemed like yesterday that I was spending just a little over $2 a gallon. That’s a big increase.”
He stressed that “the big worry that we should all have is this $1.9 trillion [coronavirus relief legislation passed by the Biden administration] on top of the $1 trillion already being pipelined into the economy [and] into the hands of the consumers. If they go out and spend that, that can cause higher prices … This is economics 100. When you increase the demand, guess what happens to the price? It goes up.”
Source: Newmax
