Well, Mr. Secretary, we had our good mutual friend Dave McCormick here a little earlier, who was once head of one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and also an under secretary of treasury. That's right. Good point. And you, as I said, had a very distinguished career on Wall Street. You arguably know more about what's going on with our economy than anybody else. You're watching all the data. What's your view of the economy right now? We obviously had some energy inflation coming out of the Iran conflict. What's your overarching view of where the economy is today?
Well, I think middle of February the president asked me, "Well, Scott, how do you think the economy is doing?" And I said, "Sir, I think we're growing up 4%. I think inflation's going to be back to target in July." And President Trump is constantly calibrating. And I think he thought because we had a strong economy, because he had made us energy independent, because we were resilient, and also we had to go in Iran because they were two weeks away, if they wanted, from a nuclear weapon. That we're very strong. We had this six weeks of fighting, 90 days total. And now I think we're coming out on the other side, and the US economy has been the most resilient in the world. And the employment numbers for the past three months have been gangbusters against all the surveys. And gasoline is going to come back down. This is an energy-induced inflation, and we are actually lower now than we were on February 27th in crude oil markets. And I think gasoline takes a little longer to come back down, but I think we'll be right back down. And I think we actually may be lower because the world is awash in crude.
And we've done our job in that respect, too, right?
We have. I tell you, I was at the Petroleum Club of Houston three weeks ago. And I can't tell you just the difference of being in Texas, being in New York. I was in New York. And Petroleum Club of Houston, they say the Pledge of Allegiance, there's a prayer before the meeting, and then you get to speak. They don't do that in New York. And people are voting with their feet. People are voting with their feet. Every two people leave California and one comes to Texas, I think every minute.
And I think I saw, Mr. Secretary, that for the first time in the post-World War II era, there are now more Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Texas than in the state of California. I think I saw that.
Yeah, look, California, New York, and look, I lived in New York for a long time. I was from South Carolina. Went to school in the Northeast. Thank you, South Carolina. Went to school in the Northeast and then lived in New York for many years. And people say, "Do you miss New York?" And I said, "Well, I miss the New York I lived in." Like the New York I lived in, I got there, David Dinkins was a very nice man, but not a very good mayor. He was the mayor. It was kind of Calcutta without the cows. And then Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg came in and the place was just humming. And you see how leadership matters. You know, Bill de Blasio came in and I didn't think there could be anyone worse than Comrade de Blasio. And now we've got it. And I've got to hand it to President Trump. I went to the meeting there with Mayor Adams, and President Trump looked at him, and this was after he won, so December, and he looked at him and said, "You're the leader of the Democratic Party." So Donald Trump predicted what's going on back in December.
Right there. Yeah, there's no question about it.
I was on the phone with Senator Collins of Maine yesterday. And I'm not allowed to comment on other candidates, but just like her temperament and the policies, it's a stark contrast.
Yes. And speaking of stark contrast, you gave a great speech this week to the New York Economic Club, which I believe you were a member of for many years. And I would commend, by the way, that speech to anybody who wants to pull it up and either read the transcript or watch the video. But you talked, Mr. Secretary, about the fact that we are no longer going to allow our economic and national security to diverge. And you went through a number of key things including our ability to produce what we need, so we're not dependent upon adversaries either in a pandemic or at a time of a military conflict. You talked about supply chains. Would you kind of give a synopsis of that speech and talk about how it drives Trump's economic policy?
Sure. And whenever you're kind of called spontaneously and asked to give the prayer, I always have a fallback, and I always talk about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Like we're grateful for yesterday. Here we are today, and what do we want for tomorrow? So, yesterday, at the end of World War II, it was good for US national policy to rebuild our allies in Europe, to make sure that communism did not flourish, and it gave us the greatest economy in the world, and we tolerated a lot from that. We were willing to because we were growing so much faster than the rest of the world. We were concerned about the Soviet Union. And we let that way of doing business go for too long. We had the China shock in the early 2000s that gutted our manufacturing sector, and we brought down the Iron Curtain, and it was almost like we needed another worthy adversary, but we let China come right up behind us. We've had a $30 trillion economy. They've now got a $20 trillion economy, and that's up 20 or 40X.
There were a couple of very smart people in there. A couple is two.
Well, a couple of — do you have any names?
We've had more cabinet meetings in a year than they did all four years. So there was — it was kind of vanilla, chocolate was the decision President Biden made. But we let our national interest get away from us. And in this era of free trade, Mike Pence and I — and I think Vice President Pence is a patriot. But he was describing the old world of unfettered free trade where the manufacturing base left, the middle part of the country got hollowed out. And I just said, Mr. Vice President, we can't tell people to let them eat flat screens. I think people would rather have their communities back. They'd rather have the dignity of work than the cheap gadgets.
And Main Street suffered.
At the Economic Club, someone asked me, "What would you like for your legacy to be? What do you think the president's legacy will be for his second administration?" And I said, parallel prosperity. Wall Street always does great. But it's Main Street's turn to catch up. And Main Street came back. Look, we have spent a lot of time at Treasury with our small and community banks. Elizabeth Warren is always, "Oh, well, I'm afraid of a bank going under." Well, Senator, you put 45% of the small banks in America under. The financial regulations from 2008, 2009 — it was too big to fail, but they became too small to succeed. And our Main Street and small banks, they finance small business. They finance agriculture. They finance the community real estate loans. And we're trying to bring those back. So the stock market can do great, but it is time for Main Street to do better.
Now, as you know, we're celebrating this week the one-year anniversary of the signing of the working families tax cut. We brought the corporate rates down. We accelerated depreciation for investment. We have the Trump accounts, expansion of the child tax credit, standard deduction, no tax on tips, reduced taxes on Social Security benefits and for seniors. It's now been in place for a year. What impact is that having on working families, on small businesses, on job creation, and on the larger economy?
Look, I think there's something here for everyone, too. And there's also private education funding, too.
