Bret Baier Torpedoes Trump Treasury Chief Over $2000 Check Scheme

Trump has faced criticism from almost all quarters over his trade policies, which have been blamed for a large portion of the price increases that have proved a turning point in this month's election campaign.

One of Trump's responses has been the promise of rebate checks to Americans based on tariff revenue, which he claims will offset the costs.

On Tuesday night's edition of Fox News Channel's Special Report, Baier hit back at Bessant in a debate on the "affordability crisis," when Bessant attributed it to a "demand shock."

Bret Baier: What is an affordability crisis? You listen to the Democrats, that's obviously the term they're using. The president is also talking about it a lot. Is there a crisis in this case?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant: Well, they should know—they should know about it because they created it. This massive government spending, spending, spending, spending has led to the worst inflation in 40 or 50 years.

And if we go back, what did the president do differently from his first term?

So, with this massive wave of government spending, he had a demand shock. But even worse, he had a massive regulatory buildup. So, a demand shock and a supply constraint, that's one of the reasons for this inflation.

President Trump, right now and during his first term, you get a demand shock from the private sector, but you remove regulations, and then you can go back to non-inflationary growth.

But look, we're working on this every day, and my guess is that in the first quarter, the second quarter, we'll see that inflation has come down, it's coming down, and real income, the other side of that equation is real income growth, and that's what we're going to see from all this investment.

Bret Baier: Will the $2,000 tariff dividend checks people are getting be inflationary?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant: So, a lot of things are going to happen next year.

Bret Baier: Is this one of them?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant: And this could be one of them. And then, maybe we can convince Americans to save.

Because what's going to happen next year is Trump accounts. For the next three years, every child born on January 1st will get a government account that goes into the stock market.

So, for the next three years, every American child born on January 1st will have this access. They can withdraw it when they turn 18. They'll learn the power of compound interest, and there'll be a lot of financial literacy about it.

And I think the disastrous election we saw in New York is because young people don't feel like they have a stake in the economy, so we want to give them a stake in the economy.

Government spending, asking if exemptions could have the same effect: