Lutnick: Federal government inflates pre-election GDP with spending spikes
Howard Lutnick · Howard Lutnick | All-In DC · Mar 20, 2025 · at 47:46
Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary and Trump Transition Chairman, discusses plans to revise GDP calculations to exclude non-productive government spending.
“And I'm going to break it out for the last 20 years. And what you're going to see is, Every time the quarter just before an election, all the government spending happens right then and there. It's all of a sudden you have this jump in GDP. Right. Total lie. Total lie. They basically, they just take all this money and they jack it into the quarter so that we have that and you'll see it.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →