jason, let s just for the moment leave aside the illegality of the trump tariffs that are not based on any kind of national security calculus but let s talk to the audience about why tariffs are not the tool, not the magic wand that donald trump thinks they are. i mean, i think we kind of have a full display of that going on right now, but why did president obama never say, you know what, i m going to help the domestic manufacturer of washington machines by slapping a tariff on chinese washing machines. tariffs are attacks on american consumers. they are pretty regressive tax that costs the most and takes the most out of a paycheck of low and moderate income households and then a number of the things we put tariffs on are used in american production. in fact, there are american steel factories that are being hurt because they re using some chinese steel and remaking it into products in america.
much faster rate than their income. the personal savings rate is near the lowest its ever been. so there is a whiff of unsustainability about where we are and the way out of that is wage growth, is job growth, that is what can give us a sustainable growth going forward, not the stock market. jason, good to talk to you. jason ferman the former chair of the white house council of economic advisers. they pin their homes on bitcoin and now the early cryptocurrencies want to help those step into the unknown and invest in the bitcoin network. they ll help you and we ll see what we can learn from them when we come back. or even trouble with recall. thankfully, the breakthrough in prevagen helps your brain and actually improves memory. the secret is an ingredient originally discovered. in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown
jason ferman was the chairman of the counsel of economic advisers for president obama. he s now the professor at the kennedy school. jason, there is an interesting line here. president trump has tweeted at least 60 times since he was elected about the stock market. now i remember in 2008 when george bush was president and the markets were having trouble. he and ben bernanke would give speeches about what was going on and acknowledging that was happening. but generally speaking, why is it a bad thing for president s to be talking up talking the stock market up or down? i think it is bad for three reasons. one, financially you don t know where the stock market will go. it goes up, it goes down and some of the high value agsz valuations are risks to the economy going forward. the second is economically, it is not a great indicator about how families are doing. half of households in our country don t have any exposure to the stock market directly or indirectly.
unwanted sexual contact dropped by more than a quarter in the past two years. reports of sexual assaults skyrocketed by 63%. it s kind of a mixed message. but outgoing defense secretary chuck hagel said the general trend was a positive one. showing that service members are more comfortable reporting their assaults. not everyone shares their view however. here s senator kristin gillibrand who earlier this year sponsored a bill to overhaul the way military sexual assaults are prosecuted. to have that number stay the same shows there is no structural reform. that the reforms that are necessary to fix this serious problem aren t there. both side agree there s still much more work to be done. coming up we re going to talk the economy and politics with house economic adviser jason ferman.
seems not right to you, you might not be the only one. brit hume on this. that was a sad briefing. that really was. that performance by jason ferman was one of the most unconvincing performance i ve seen. the answers to the questions, they are pathetic. here we have an economy struggling to find its footing and get moving on the robust economy we ve been hoping for and here comes a program espoused by the president that at least at the lower income levels will discourage work. that is not good news for the economy, and i think it will be seen as good news by anybody. and keep in mind, remember how it was sold. not only would it drive down the costs of health care and of course you can keep your doctor but here s nancy pelosi talking about forget the news it is going to lead to the loss of over two million jobs, here she is talking about how it is going to create four million jobs. she was only off by about six million.