Episode
📊 The US economy at midyear: My chat (+transcript) with economic analyst Joey Politano
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- Jul 25, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1648
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Summary
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, With tariff and immigration policies uncertain, and the emerging AI revolution continuing to emerge, there’s plenty to speculate about when it comes to the US economy. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I invite Joseph Politano to help us try and make sense of it all. He is the author of the popular Apricitas Economics Substack newsletter. Politano previously worked as an analyst at the Bureau of Labor Statistics . In This Episode * Trade and immigration headwinds (1:03) * Unpredictable trade policy (7:32) * Tariffs as a political tool (12:10) * The goal: higher tariffs (17:53) * An AI tailwind (20:42) Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Trade and immigration headwinds (1:03) You're going to have what is probably the largest one-year change in immigration in US history. Pethokoukis: What are the main economic headwinds that you're tracking right now? Or is it just trade, trade, trade? Politano: It’s hard for me to not say it’s trade, trade, trade because that's what my newsletter has been covering since the start of this administration and I think it's where the biggest change in longstanding policy is. If you look back on, say, the last 100 years of economic history in the United States, that's the kind of level you have to go to find a similar period where tariffs and trade restrictions were this high in the United States. At the start of this year, we were at a high compared to the early 2000s, but it was not that large compared to the 1970s, 1960s, the early post-war era. Most of that, especially in Trump's first term, was concentrated in China, and then a couple of specific sectors like steel or cars from Mexico. Now we have one, you had the big jump in the baseline — there's ten perce…