minimum wage economics

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat down with Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff for a fast twenty four minute interview aimed squarely at young Americans who have been told for three years that the economy is fine and have not felt it. The pitch is built on one chart he had posted that morning: wage growth for the bottom quartile of earners running at 5.5% against 3.5% inflation. From there the conversation moves through immigration and rents, financial illiteracy, Trump accounts as a mass equity ownership program, a manufacturing and small business formation boom he credits partly to AI, roughly half a trillion dollars a year in federal fraud, and a bond market that now costs $50 billion a year for every trillion borrowed. You can watch the full interview here.

TLDW

Bessent argues the K shaped economy is ending because the bottom 25% of wage earners are now posting 5.5% wage growth against 3.5% inflation, a roughly 2% real gain that compounds if it holds. He frames the recovery as a two lever problem: slow price increases through energy deregulation and getting past the Iran conflict, and raise incomes through private sector job creation rather than government jobs that are simply indexed to inflation. He credits reduced immigration with lifting wages at the 25th percentile and points to academic work suggesting rents fall where immigration enforcement goes. He makes an extended case for financial literacy as a policy failure, pitching Trump accounts as a real time learning vehicle with 7 million signups so far against 70 million eligible households, more than 90% of them earning under $200,000, a $1,000 seed for children born during the term, employer contributions up to $2,500, and 15 age tiered Treasury learning modules. He reports factory construction at a 15 year high, cites a Boeing Dreamliner expansion in his hometown of Charleston, and says one payments company saw an 80% jump in small business formation in a year as AI agents let founders start companies with one to three people instead of ten. On fraud he cites GAO estimates of $400 billion to $600 billion annually, nearly 2% of GDP, and calls for state level transparency pledges. On debt he concedes the stock is enormous but says deficit to GDP is falling and 3% to 4% real growth cures it, using a mortgage analogy where you grow into the payment. He closes on media framing, arguing the Biden era gaslighting about a vibecession will now run in reverse.

Thoughts

The headline number deserves a careful look because it is doing enormous political work. Bessent compares 5.5% wage growth for the bottom quartile against 3.5% inflation and gets 2% real. Both halves of that comparison are probably defensible on their own, but they are not the same population. A quartile specific wage series measures a cohort, while headline inflation measures an economy wide basket, and low income households spend a much larger share of income on exactly the categories that have run hottest. He actually concedes this point himself earlier in the same answer when he says cumulative inflation was 21.5% but may have been 35% for working Americans once you account for groceries, insurance, and auto payments. You cannot use the higher working class inflation figure to describe the damage and then the lower headline figure to describe the recovery. To his credit he does not oversell it. He says 2% is not the be all and end all and that he wishes it were faster. The honest version of his claim is a rate of change argument: the direction reversed. That is real and it matters, but a 2% annual real gain against a 21.5% cumulative hole takes the better part of a decade to fill, and voters experience levels, not derivatives.

The immigration and wages segment is the most falsifiable thing in the interview, which is why it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. The mechanism is plain supply and demand in a specific labor market: reduce the inflow of workers competing for low skill jobs and the price of that labor rises. Blake Neff makes the point cleanly and Bessent adds that the same logic applies to housing, since roughly ten to twenty five million people arriving against no new housing stock pushes rents up. His supporting claim, that academic studies show rents fall where ICE operates, is the weakest link in an otherwise tight argument because he names no study and the effect could just as easily reflect households leaving a neighborhood rather than a broad market cooling. The framing that this is a real time experiment proving the smug elites wrong is the part that will age either very well or very badly, and it is testable within a couple of years. If bottom quartile real wage gains persist while overall employment holds, the labor supply argument wins on the merits and a lot of published economics needs revising. If those gains stall out as the one time supply shock washes through, the same chart becomes an argument against the policy.

Trump accounts get the most airtime and the interesting mechanic is not the one being marketed. The $1,000 seed for a child born during the term is small and gets the headlines. The provision that could actually change behavior is that employers can contribute up to $2,500, which turns the account into a recruiting benefit that candidates will start asking about, the way a 401(k) match became table stakes. Bessent sees this and says it directly: do you have a Trump account match, do you have a gifting program. That is how a program escapes politics and becomes plumbing. The adoption data he cites supports the design intent, with more than 90% of the 7 million signups coming from households under $200,000, meaning it is reaching people who did not already own equities rather than subsidizing people who did. His financial service deserts analogy to food deserts is genuinely useful framing. But there is a sequencing problem sitting right inside his own answer that nobody picks up. He notes the share of families who cannot cover a $500 medical emergency, and those are precisely the families for whom a long horizon equity account is the wrong first product. Emergency liquidity comes before compounding. The account is a good idea that will do the most good for households who are already one rung above the ones he describes.

The most underpriced idea in the interview arrives around the seventeen minute mark and gets less than sixty seconds. Bessent says one payments company reported an 80% increase in small business formation in a single year, and points to the Wall Street Journal piece on the rise of the one person company: work that used to require five to fifteen employees now gets done by one to three people plus AI agents. Treat the specific number with caution, since signups at a single payment processor measure that processor’s market share as much as real firm creation, and business formation filings historically include a lot of entities that never employ anyone. But the underlying shift is the single most consequential thing he said, and he frames it entirely as good news, which is only half the picture. The same collapse in the headcount required to start a company is the collapse in the headcount required to run one. He is describing a world where a motivated twenty two year old can launch something real with almost no capital, and simultaneously a world with far fewer of the entry level coordination jobs that used to be the on ramp. Both are true at once. The optimistic read only holds if the newly cheap path to founding a company absorbs the people displaced from the newly expensive path to being hired, and that is a bet, not an observation.

The last five minutes carry the two arguments with the longest shelf life. On fraud, GAO estimates of $400 billion to $600 billion a year, close to 2% of GDP, are large enough that recovering even a fraction changes the fiscal arithmetic, and his structural point is the right one: once money leaves the door it rarely comes back, so the leverage is at the payment gate, not the clawback. His transparency argument is better than the partisan framing he wraps it in. He notes Minnesota’s corruption was findable precisely because Minnesota published its data, while New York, Illinois, California, and some red states have clammed up, and he explicitly includes red states in the indictment. A transparency pledge is a policy any coalition could sign. Then the bond market answer, where the mortgage analogy is doing all the work and hiding the assumption. He is right that a manageable debt is a function of growth as much as level, and that deficit to GDP has moved. But the analogy of a thirty year old who grew into a tight mortgage payment quietly assumes the raise arrives. His stated requirement is 3% to 4% real GDP growth sustained, which is well above the postwar trend and roughly double what the CBO projects. His own AI argument is arguably the strongest case that such growth is possible. It is also the only case, which is a thin place to rest a debt trajectory that now costs $50 billion a year for every trillion borrowed against $15 billion not long ago.

Key Takeaways

Bessent’s central data point is that the bottom 25% of wage earners posted 5.5% wage growth against 3.5% inflation, producing roughly 2% real wage growth, which he presented as evidence the K shaped economy is ending.
He explicitly rejects the Biden administration’s posture of telling people they do not know what they are feeling, and says this administration starts from the premise that what Americans report experiencing is real.
He puts cumulative inflation under the previous administration at 21.5%, and argues the effective figure for working Americans was closer to 35% once groceries, insurance, and auto payments are weighted properly.
The generational framing: this cohort came out of the blocks into the great financial crisis, then COVID, then the inflation shock, which he offers as the reason the blackpilling among young people is understandable rather than irrational.
His metaphor for policy sequencing is a medical procedure. First you stop the bleeding, then you turn the ship, and the US economy is an aircraft carrier rather than a PT boat.
There are two routes out of the squeeze in his framing: slow the rate of price increases, and grow wages and jobs. He treats the second as the only durable path to prosperity.
He dismisses government job creation on the grounds that government wages are effectively indexed to the inflation rate and therefore do not compound into real gains the way private sector wages do.
Factory construction and manufacturing activity are at levels not seen in 15 years, which he presents as the leading indicator behind the private sector job claim.
Reduced immigration is credited with the wage gains at the 25th percentile specifically, on the theory that the previous inflow of ten million or more people competed directly with lower skill and younger workers.
The same argument extends to housing. With no corresponding new housing stock, the arrival of somewhere between ten and twenty five million people is offered as a driver of the rent spike.
He claims academic studies show rents decline in areas where immigration enforcement operates, though no specific study is named in the interview.
He frames the last few years as a real time natural experiment on whether supply and demand governs the bottom end of the labor market, and says the result vindicates the position that it does.
Kolvet raises economic illiteracy among young people as a felt need rather than a scolding point, blaming the education system rather than students, illustrated by a student who wanted the minimum wage raised without knowing the tradeoff.
Bessent identifies two separate deficiencies: civics education and financial literacy, and treats them as related failures of the same institutions.
His nostalgia argument for home economics is sharper than it sounds. The class was not primarily about cooking, it was about running a household budget and understanding a mortgage.
He argues personal finance has gotten materially harder since his youth, naming buy now pay later, credit card traps, mortgage selection, the rent versus buy decision, and retirement vehicle choice.
38% of American households have no exposure to equity markets at all, which he treats as the core justification for a universal ownership program.
Trump accounts are seeded with $1,000 for a child born during the term, and can also be opened voluntarily with contributions from family, employers, states, and philanthropists.
Adoption stands at roughly 7 million signups against approximately 70 million eligible households, so the program is at about 10% penetration.
More than 90% of the households signing up earn less than $200,000, which Bessent uses as evidence the program is reaching people who did not already own stock.
Employers can contribute up to $2,500 per account, which Bessent expects to become a competitive fringe benefit that job candidates ask about the way they ask about a retirement match.
Treasury has built 15 learning modules tiered by child age at roughly four, six, and eight, plus separate modules aimed at parents who have never invested before.
The financial service desert concept is his own analogy to food deserts: whole neighborhoods, urban and rural, where opening a brokerage account is simply not part of the environment.
He points to the share of families who cannot produce $500 for a medical emergency as the population the program is meant to pull into asset ownership.
The archival Charlie Kirk clip makes the case for tokenizing the accounts inside family culture, with $25 contributions for winning a spelling bee or a sports championship, so children track a portfolio through childhood.
Kirk’s political argument, repeated by Kolvet, is that a nation of renters with no skin in the game is a recipe for radicalized politics, and that early ownership is the antidote.
Kirk’s framing of billionaire wealth is instructive rather than defensive: the reason America has a trillionaire is that he holds a large pile of equities, and the takeaway offered to young people is that they can own a slice of the same market.
Bessent invokes Alexander Hamilton as his predecessor at Treasury and argues the founders could not have imagined the economic scale the country reached by its 250th anniversary.
He recounts his confirmation hearing exchange with Bernie Sanders over oligarchs, countering that Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos built their own fortunes and that Musk arrived as a student immigrant.
On the near term outlook he expects real income gains and says core inflation excluding food and energy is already lower, with energy prices tied to resolution of the Iran conflict he hoped was days away.
The Boeing plant in his hometown of Charleston is expanding Dreamliner capacity by 50%, generating construction jobs first and then roughly a thousand high paying factory jobs.
He frames those Boeing jobs as the replacement for the textile industry that was decimated in the South Carolina of his childhood, which is a specific and checkable version of the reindustrialization claim.
Against the prevailing AI anxiety, he says the non obvious effect he is seeing is a surge in small business formation, with one payments company reporting an 80% increase in a single year.
He points readers to the Wall Street Journal piece on the rise of the one person company: ventures that used to need five to fifteen employees now run with one to three people plus AI agents.
On fraud, his structural insight is that recovery after disbursement almost never works, so the entire effort has moved to blocking payments at the source.
He serves on Vice President Vance’s fraud task force and credits Dr. Mehmet Oz with the healthcare side of the effort.
GAO estimates federal fraud at $400 billion to $600 billion annually, which Bessent notes is almost 2% of GDP.
His Minneapolis roundtable example involves payments intended for autism centers being diverted, which he offers as the human face of an otherwise abstract number.
The transparency argument is the most portable idea in the segment: Minnesota’s fraud was discoverable because Minnesota published location level data, while New York, Illinois, California, and some red states have restricted theirs.
He proposes that every politician sign a spending transparency pledge, framing it as a demand voters should make regardless of party.
On bonds, Neff notes yields are rising in Japan too, and that each trillion borrowed now carries about $50 billion a year in interest versus roughly $15 billion under prior rate conditions.
Bessent concedes the debt stock is tremendous but says deficit to GDP has come down and the strategy is to grow out of it rather than shrink the numerator alone.
His debt analogy is a tight mortgage taken at thirty that becomes manageable through pay increases, with 3% to 4% real GDP growth as the stated requirement.
Growth alone is not the whole plan in his telling. It has to be paired with recovering waste, fraud, and abuse and controlling spending.
Late in the interview Kolvet points to accelerated amortization provisions driving real capital spending, citing restaurants building new kitchens to capture the deduction.
New paid family leave guidance was issued but there was no time to cover it, which Bessent uses to characterize the administration as family friendly.
The closing argument is about narrative velocity: he expects no fair shake from the press, but predicts the dynamic inverts from the Biden era, where the media insisted a bad economy was a vibecession.
The interview is bookended by tributes to Charlie Kirk, whose optimistic and open minded posture Bessent contrasts with the current tone of political debate.

Detailed Summary

The Wage Chart and the Case That the K Shaped Economy Is Ending

The interview opens on the blackpilling problem: young people who say they are falling behind, that there is no hope, that the opportunity their parents had is gone. Bessent’s first move is a rhetorical one, and it is deliberate. He refuses the previous administration’s position of telling people they do not understand their own experience. He then validates the timeline, noting that this generation came out of the blocks into the great financial crisis, where their parents may have been under pressure or lost homes, then into COVID, then into an inflation shock he puts at 21.5% cumulative and perhaps as high as 35% for working Americans once groceries, insurance, and auto payments are weighted properly. Only after establishing that does he pivot to the chart he had posted that morning, which shows the bottom 25% of wage earners at 5.5% wage growth against 3.5% inflation. His argument is explicitly about rate of change rather than level. Two percent real is not the be all and end all, he says, but it accumulates. The medical metaphor carries the sequencing: first you stop the bleeding, then you turn the ship, and the US economy is an aircraft carrier rather than a PT boat. He also concedes he would prefer it happen faster, which is a notable admission from a sitting Treasury Secretary and gives the rest of the pitch more credibility than a pure victory lap would have.

Two Levers: Slowing Prices and Growing Wages

Bessent describes exactly two exits from the current squeeze. The first is slowing the rate of price increases, which he attributes to energy deregulation and expects to improve further once the Iran conflict resolves and energy prices come back down, with core inflation excluding food and energy already lower. The second, which he calls the real path to prosperity, is wage growth and job creation. Here he draws a sharp line between government and private employment. Government jobs, he argues, are effectively indexed to the inflation rate, so creating one or two million of them produces headcount without producing real income growth. Private sector jobs compound. The evidence he offers is a manufacturing boom visible both in factory construction and in output measures running at levels not seen in fifteen years. This is the framework the rest of the interview hangs on, and it is worth noting how much of it depends on energy, which is the one variable most exposed to a geopolitical event outside Treasury’s control.

Immigration, Labor Supply, and the Rent Argument

Blake Neff pushes the wage story into its most contested territory by connecting it to immigration. His framing is straightforward supply and demand: with ten million or more people waved in under the prior administration, the pressure landed on the 25th percentile of wages, which is lower skill work and younger workers, so it is unsurprising that this is exactly the cohort now seeing the fastest gains. Bessent picks it up and extends it, saying that for years the profession insisted supply and demand somehow did not apply at the bottom end of the labor market, and that a real time experiment has now proven the smug elites wrong. He then applies the same logic to housing. Whether the number was ten, fifteen, or twenty five million, there was no new housing stock to accommodate it, which sent rents through the roof. His supporting claim is that academic studies show rents fall where ICE operates. He names no study, and the causal reading is contestable, but the claim is specific enough to be checked, which is more than most interview economics offers.

Economic Illiteracy as a Policy Failure

Andrew Kolvet raises what he calls a felt need rather than a talking point: a basic economic illiteracy among young people that he explicitly blames on the people who were supposed to teach them, illustrated by a student at a leadership summit who wanted the minimum wage raised without any awareness of the tradeoff. Bessent splits the problem in two. Civics is one deficiency, and he frames Turning Point primarily as a civic engagement organization on that basis. Financial literacy is the other, and here he gets more specific and more interesting. His argument for home economics is not nostalgia for cooking class. The point of the course was to teach household budgeting and how a mortgage works, and he argues the terrain has gotten dramatically more complicated since his own twenties. The list he rattles off is contemporary and real: buy now pay later, credit card traps, choosing among mortgage products, deciding at a given age whether renting beats buying, and selecting a retirement vehicle. His claim is that the decisions got harder while the instruction disappeared.

Trump Accounts: Mechanics, Adoption, and the Ownership Thesis

Trump accounts occupy the longest stretch of the interview and Bessent pitches them as the ultimate real time learning experience rather than as a subsidy. The justification is a single statistic: 38% of American households have no exposure to equity markets, and he says he understands why they feel left out. The mechanics are that a child born during the term is seeded with $1,000, accounts can be opened voluntarily for other children, and contributions can come from family, employers, states, and philanthropists. Employers can put in up to $2,500, which Bessent expects to become a standard fringe benefit that candidates evaluate alongside a retirement match. Adoption is roughly 7 million signups against approximately 70 million eligible households, and more than 90% of those signing up earn under $200,000, which he presents as evidence the program is reaching households that did not already own equities. Treasury has built 15 learning modules tiered by child age at roughly four, six, and eight, plus a parent track built on the assumption that many signing parents have never been in the market. His own contribution to the framing is the financial service desert, a deliberate analogy to food deserts: neighborhoods urban and rural where opening a brokerage account is simply outside the environment, and where families who cannot produce $500 for a medical emergency are not contemplating one. He positions the account as a savings vehicle that beats 3% at the bank, funded by $20 birthday gifts and graduation contributions.

The Charlie Kirk Clip and the Nation of Renters Argument

The hosts play an archival clip of Charlie Kirk from the debate over the reconciliation bill, and it turns out to be the sharpest articulation of the ownership thesis in the whole segment. Kirk’s pitch is behavioral rather than fiscal: the program could make people capitalists at age seven, with nine and ten year olds tracking whether their stock is up, and families tokenizing contributions around achievements such as winning a spelling bee or a sports championship. The goal is that children arrive at eighteen or twenty one as co-owners in America rather than renters. Kirk then handles the billionaire question head on, arguing that the reason America has a trillionaire is that he owns a large pile of equities, that the same is true of every one of the country’s largest fortunes, and that the correct message to send a young person is that they can own a piece of the same thing from birth. Kolvet supplies the political corollary Kirk used to make: if you want radicalized politics, create a nation of renters with no skin in the game. Bessent agrees and adds his own version, that when you own a piece of the pie you do not want to throw it out the window.

Manufacturing, Boeing, and the AI Driven Small Business Surge

Asked what specifically gives him confidence in the private sector, Bessent goes local. The Boeing plant in Charleston, his hometown, is undertaking a 50% expansion of Dreamliner capacity, which produces construction jobs immediately and then roughly a thousand high paying factory jobs, and he ties it directly to Trump selling Boeing aircraft abroad. He frames those jobs as the replacement for the textile industry that was decimated in the South Carolina of his childhood, which is a more concrete version of the reindustrialization argument than the usual aggregate statistics. He then addresses AI anxiety with a claim he calls non obvious: small business formation is going through the roof. His source is a conversation with a credit card and payments company that saw an 80% increase in small business signups in a single year, and he directs listeners to a Wall Street Journal article from two weeks prior on the rise of the one person company. The mechanism is that starting a business used to require five, ten, or fifteen employees, and now founders are doing it with one to three people plus AI agents. He calls it a powerful trend for small business and moves on, which is arguably the largest structural claim in the interview receiving the least examination.

Fraud, Improper Payments, and the Transparency Pledge

Bessent’s fraud answer starts with the operational reality rather than the number: once money goes out the door it is very difficult to get back, so the entire strategy is to cut it off at the source. He describes an all of government effort under Vice President Vance’s task force, credits Dr. Mehmet Oz on the healthcare side, and cites GAO estimates of $400 billion to $600 billion in fraud annually, which he notes is almost 2% of GDP. The example he reaches for is a Minneapolis roundtable where payments intended for autism centers were diverted, and he says the fraudsters know exactly how to work the system. Then comes the part that transcends the partisan framing. Minnesota’s fraud was discoverable, he argues, precisely because Minnesota was transparent about where money went, which is how an independent investigator could go location to location and find that a listed center did not exist. Try the same exercise in New York, Illinois, or California and the data is not there, and he explicitly notes that even some red states have clammed up. His ask is that voters demand transparency from every politician and that a transparency pledge become a standard commitment.

The Bond Market and Growing Out of the Debt

With a minute left, Neff raises rising bond yields, noting the same move is visible in Japan and that each trillion dollars borrowed now costs about $50 billion a year in interest against roughly $15 billion under prior rate conditions. Bessent opens with a joke about worrying enough for every American, then makes the actual argument in three parts. Deficit to GDP has come down. The stock of debt outstanding is tremendous. And the plan is to grow out of it rather than to shrink it directly. His analogy is a mortgage taken at thirty where the payments felt very tight until pay increases made them comfortable, and he specifies the requirement plainly: three to four percent real GDP growth. He pairs it with recovering waste, fraud, and abuse and controlling spending, so growth is not presented as the entire answer, but it is clearly the load bearing element. Neither host presses on whether that growth rate is achievable on a sustained basis, which is the question the entire trajectory rests on.

The Closing Argument About Narrative

Kolvet closes with a worry rather than a softball: all of the good news he believes is happening, from tax cuts to accelerated amortization provisions that have restaurants building new kitchens, takes time to reach people, and he hopes the effect lands before elections. Bessent’s answer is about media dynamics and it is more interesting than the usual complaint. He says flatly that he does not expect a fair shake, but predicts the dynamic will run opposite to the Biden era. Then, the press told Americans the economy was fine and they were experiencing a vibe session. Now, he argues, the press will tell them things are terrible while their actual experience improves, and lived experience wins that fight. The trend is your friend, he says. Kolvet’s summary is the political version of the whole interview, that wages are rising fastest at the bottom rungs and small business formation is surging, and that the story has to be told or the field is ceded to policies he characterizes as price fixing that leads to ruin. Neither one gets to paid family leave, on which new guidance had just been issued.

Notable Quotes

“What we’re not going to do with this administration is to do what the Biden administration did and tell people they don’t know what they’re feeling.”
Scott Bessent, opening his answer on why young people feel left behind

“It’s kind of like a medical procedure. First, you got to stop the bleeding, which we did. And now we’re able to turn the ship, and the US economy is like an aircraft carrier. It’s not a PT boat.”
Scott Bessent, on why the recovery is slower than voters want

“5.5% real wage growth, or wage growth, versus 3.5% inflation. So you get 2%, and 2% is not the be all and end all, but then you start accumulating that over time.”
Scott Bessent, describing the chart he posted the morning of the interview

“We got a real-time experiment that once again, the smug elites proven wrong. There are academic studies that show where ICE goes, rents go down.”
Scott Bessent, on immigration levels, housing stock, and the price of rent

“38% of households do not have exposure to our great equity markets. I understand they feel left out. And I say it is fitting that every American has a piece of the action.”
Scott Bessent, on the statistic behind the Trump accounts program

“This could change the game and make people capitalists at age seven. It’s a way where kids can actually save their entire childhood and be co-owners in America, not just renters.”
Charlie Kirk, in an archival clip from the reconciliation bill debate played during the interview

“If you wanted to go out, be an entrepreneur, start your own company, before you might need five, ten, fifteen employees. Now a lot of people are doing it with one, two, or three and some AI agents.”
Scott Bessent, on the rise of the one person company and why he sees AI as a small business tailwind

“Blue states and red states, they don’t like to tell you where the money goes. Every politician should have to sign a transparency pledge.”
Scott Bessent, on why state level spending data is the precondition for finding fraud

“Think about if you got a mortgage when you were 30 and the monthly payments were very tight, but then you did well at your job, you got good pay increases, and then you grew your way out of it.”
Scott Bessent, on the strategy for the national debt and why he needs 3% to 4% real growth

“They said, oh, it’s a vibe session, you don’t know how good you have it. Well, we believe what Americans are feeling. The trend is your friend.”
Scott Bessent, closing on why he expects media framing to lose to lived experience this time

The full conversation runs about twenty four minutes and moves quickly, and the segments on the one person company and on state spending transparency are worth the time even if you discount the political framing entirely. Watch the full interview here.

Tag: minimum wage economics

Scott Bessent Says Bottom 25% Wage Growth Is Now Beating Inflation: Trump Accounts, the AI One Person Company Boom, and $600 Billion in Federal Fraud