NEC director on holiday shopping prices, healthcare subsidies and more

(CBS, KYMA) - Kevin Hassett, White House National Economic Council (NEC) Director, spoke with Nancy Cordes on Face the Nation Sunday about holiday shopping prices.

Surveys from both Goldman Sachs and Bank of America say low and middle-income Americans are planning to pull back a little bit from shopping during the holidays because "they perceive that prices are higher."

The surveys also say if spending is up this year, then it's going to be because of goods, in part, are more expensive.

This prompted Cordes to ask Hassett if this is a temporary results, or long-term result, of the tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration, to which Hassett said:

"Those were reports about what people anticipated would happen over the Thanksgiving weekend, but we now have hard data for Black Friday and even for Saturday and the online sales were up almost 10%, in store sales were up 4%, it was really a blockbuster weekend after Thanksgiving. And so I think that the folks who are saying, wow, maybe people are going to be anxious about going back and getting presents for the kids and so on. They've been disproven this weekend, and I think the reason is that people...incomes are up this year. We had a great jobs report and with strong income and the government shut down over so that people presumably have a little pent up demand as well. I think that we're looking at a great recovery from a weak few weeks because of the shutdown."

During the interview, Cordes and Hassett talked about healthcare subsidies, with Cordes saying the White House floated a plan to extend Obamacare premium subsidies for two years, which Hassett dropped the proposal, and President Donald Trump said he didn't want it extended for two years and rather not extend it at all.

When asked if this was a case of "the right hand not talking to the left hand," Hassett said:

"No, I think that people were talking to each other. But what happened as, you know, as a professional journalist, is that sometimes people leak pre-decisional things that are confidential and pre-decisional. And I think that somebody did that, and then it rolled back because it hadn't been through the whole process, but President Trump has been clear that he's very concerned about the cost of health care, and that's why we had $50 billion for rural hospitals in the 'Big, Beautiful, Bill,' why we tried to get $30 billion in for cost sharing. And the Democrats didn't like that. They had an alternative approach. And so I think that what we're going to see now, between now and Christmas, is that people are going to work this out, because we have a solution. The White House has a solution for cost sharing, and the Democrats have an alternative. And, you know, people don't want for the few seniors that have really, really massive increases to see those. But don't forget, the vast majority of people in the Affordable Care Act are getting their insurance for less than $50 a month, and so while this is an issue that needs to be worked out, we don't want to cause panic for the folks who are worried that they're going to lose the thing that they have, it's really just the very, very high cost people who are closer to retirement age that have the problem."

Later in the interview, Cordes and Hassett talked about the latter being considered a frontrunner for replacing Jay Powell as chair on the Federal Reserve, according to a report from Bloomberg.

According to Cordes, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is in charge of the search, said he's holding final interviews this week, leading her to ask Hassett how his interview was, and Hassett said:

"You know, I am not sure that Bloomberg has the story right. I'm really honored to be amongst a group of really great candidates. The thing that I was most impressive about this week when that story leaked was that really, I think the news for markets was that President Trump is close to announcing a new person who is going to replace Jay Powell. And if you look at the market response to that, it was very, very positive. We had a great Treasury auction. Interest rates went down. And so I think that the American people could expect President Trump to pick somebody who's going to help them, you know, have cheaper car loans and easier access to mortgages at lower rates. And that's what we saw in the market response to the rumor about me, which, you know, is probably about as valuable as the rumor about the health care policy that we just talked about."

To watch more of Cordes' interview with Hassett, click here.