Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran rebutted claims of significantly higher prices on goods spurred by President Donald Trump's tariffs, telling Newsmax on Thursday there is "zero evidence" of material price increases.
Miran joined "National Report" on the day that Trump's latest round of tariffs kicked in for dozens of countries. Miran reacted to the doom-and-gloom scenarios spelled out by the mainstream media, which he says are just as off base in 2025 as they were with Trump's tariffs on China in his first administration.
In 2018 and 2019, "there was zero evidence whatsoever of any macroeconomically significant inflation. We've been doing tariffs since the very first day of this administration, since January 20, and again, thus far, there's zero evidence of any macroeconomically significant inflation whatsoever," Miran said.
"So while you might get some what economists call relative price shifts, where the price of one good goes up relative to the price of another good, in aggregate, when you look across the totality of goods that are out there, there's no evidence thus far of any material increases in prices," Miran added.
In one example, CNN asserted Thursday that at 17%, "Americans will have to pay the highest tax on foreign goods since the Great Depression."
"Well, the tariff rate is higher than it's been in many decades. However, Americans aren't the ones paying the tariff," Miran said. "We really profoundly believe that just as in 2018/2019, the burden of those tariffs will ultimately be borne by the countries we're tariffing. So we completely disagree with that interpretation."
Miran agreed with the take by Ambassador Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, who wrote in The New York Times on Thursday, "Reversing decades of harmful policy that weakened our manufacturing capacity and work force will take time."
"The hyper globalization of the world and the deindustrialization of America, shipping our industries overseas to China and elsewhere, you know that didn't happen overnight. And reversing it is also not going to happen overnight," Miran said. "However, it will happen over time now that we've got the right policies in place."
"And those policies include not only the historic tariffs the president has imposed to put American workers and businesses on fair ground but also the trillions of dollars of cumulative investment commitments he's managed to get ahold of as a result of the tariffs as bargaining tools," he added.
"When you put all this together, it's a no-brainer to invest, build, and hire in the United States because the business climate is going to be so friendly to doing so. And that means that American industry is going to boom. However, as Ambassador Greer says, it will take some time for that to happen," Miran said.
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Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.