Scott Bessent Teases ‘Substantial Announcements’ on Prices and Incomes

The Trump administration is set to make announcements about tackling affordability problems on two fronts–bringing down prices and boosting incomes, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday. 

He suggested tariffs on consumer goods such as coffee and fruit will decrease, and he made unspecific references to what’s ahead for incomes.

“Imagine two lines. There is the inflation line, we’ve got that under control. It’s leveled out. That is going to start turning down,” Bessent said during a Wednesday morning interview on Fox News. “And there’s the income line, which under Biden, because so many of the jobs were government jobs, you can’t get real wage growth from a government job, real wages are going to increase.”

Trump recently spoke about sending Americans checks of $2,000 as a result of increased tariff revenue. Bessent, however, seemed to be referring to wages that will rise with more manufacturing jobs.

He added that the Trump administration “inherited this affordability mess” from President Joe Biden’s administration. 

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Bessent about several economic issues.

New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-professed democratic socialist who campaigned on affordability, decisively won a three-way race in the nation’s largest city last week. 

“When you talk about the whole thing from the off-year elections was affordability,” Kilmeade said. “That was the word people like Zohran Mamdani used, but their ways of solving that are very different from the way you would do it.”

“When you look at affordability now and you go grocery shopping, for example, what products are you working on bringing down?” he asked. “We know that certain products are down, certain up like, for example, coffee. The president says, ‘I’m going to lower the rates, tariff rates on Brazil and Vietnam and other places to try to bring the price of coffee down.’ What else are you doing?”

Bessent hinted about announcements of targeted tariff relief to lower the prices of certain products.

“You’re going to see some substantial announcements over the next couple of days in terms of things we don’t grow here in the United States,” he said. “You know, coffee being one of them. You know, bananas, other fruits, things like that. So, that will bring the prices down very quickly.”

The treasury secretary added, “We inherited this affordability mess.”

“It was the worst inflation, 40, 50 years, one of the worst in the nation’s history,” Bessent added. “And affordability has two components. So, there’s the price level and then there is the income level.”

He noted that under Biden administration policies, the consumer price index—the price of various household goods considered a key inflation measure and monitored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics—rose about 20%.

“But what happened to working Americans, their basket of goods and services, food, insurance, auto payments was up in the 30s,” Bessent added. “So, they felt a real, gigantic differential there. And what we are going to do is by bringing back high-paying manufacturing jobs, President Trump will do what he did in the first term, and that is for hourly workers and working Americans to have real wage increases.”

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