From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, May 5th.

Now, don't be ashamed if you're confused about the economy right now, and you aren't sure what you'll be able to afford to buy for the

rest of this year or what your business will be able to afford to sell. That might now include

movie tickets with the latest tariff threat. We'll explain if you haven't heard that one yet.

But the whole last week has been about as confusing an economic week as there could be,

not the least of which, because President Trump,

who got elected to bring down inflation, remember,

was celebrating the idea, celebrating the idea of buying less stuff for your kids,

but paying higher prices for it.

Here's that clip.

They made a trillion dollars when we made a trillion dollars with Biden a trillion

dollars, even a trillion one with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need.

You know, somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open. Well, maybe the children will have

two dollars instead of $30, you know, and maybe the two dollars will cost a couple of

bucks more than they would normally. The trillion dollars reference was about how much stuff

Americans buy from China. But we'll talk about the fewer dolls at higher prices theory of making

America great again. A kind of inflation, he didn't even try to claim was temporary, but it's not

just that. That's not the only reason you might be confused. The government stats that came out

last week, you probably heard some of this, showed the U.S. economy was shrinking. That means

headed toward a recession, but the opposite of what you'd expect in a shrinking economy,

the number of jobs last month,

went up. And Wall Street last week recovered almost all its April losses. Remember when

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