Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Find Out podcast. You've got Tim, Rich, and Zach today. And we're

going to take a little bit of a break talking about, you know, ICE going into all of our communities

and, you know, shooting people and everything. But we're going to talk about something.

They're done. They're done. Right. Oh, they're done now. That's all over.

Yeah. I heard they were done on. Well, we're going. Well, we're going to move to the state of the economy because we've actually got one of the top economists in the United States. We have Justin Wolfers with us, who is an Australian economist and public policy scholar, and he is a professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Justin, thanks for joining us today.

Great, good to be here. I'm also an American, by the way. Oh, you are. Oh, I'm sorry. I was reading

your Wikipedia page, so I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to. Great research being done on

those. Oh, God. Yeah, we go real deep here. I was reading the first paragraph off. But anyway, so, so, just, so, uh, tell us, just generally speaking, I saw you gave a grade for the U.S. economy recently, and I think it was a B minus. Uh, so we are hearing everything from the economy is amazing. It's great. It's never been

better to we are basically on the precipice of a recession. In your opinion, generally at the 10,000

foot level, where are we economically? Like what's working and what's not? Yeah, let me start. You just said,

I've heard this enormous range of commentary. I don't think that's true, actually. You've

heard the president say that we're off the charts. Great. When lying, liars lie, I tend to think,

you know, I'm just going to like pretend you never spoke because when you don't speak

truths, you don't deserve a seat at my table.

Yep.

So what we have is a range from people who really believe it's quite healthy to people who believe are on the cusp of a recession.

All of those things might be true.

Let me give you a few ways of thinking about this.

So first of all, the economy at the beginning of

2025, beginning of the Trump term, was in pretty good shape. To be clear, that this is not a partisan

remark, the economy in 2019 on the eve of the pandemic, so during the first Trump term, was in pretty

good shape.

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