With President Trump preparing to address the nation about the path toward ending hostilities in Iran and markets responding positively to signals that the conflict may be entering its final weeks, economist Stephen Moore joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer in considerably better spirits than his appearance the previous week, when he had warned of recession risks from the prolonged disruption to global oil markets. The change in tone, Moore said, reflects his read that the underlying economic conditions remain strong and that the removal of the energy supply disruption should produce a rapid reversal of the commodity price spike that defined March.
Moore said he reviewed oil price data going back to the 1970s and drew encouragement from the historical pattern. During the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years, oil prices climbed to inflation-adjusted levels roughly twice as high as the current spike before collapsing dramatically during the Reagan administration once deregulation and the elimination of the windfall profits tax allowed markets to function. He said he believes the same dynamic will reassert itself once the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened, projecting that gasoline prices could return to three dollars a gallon within four to six weeks of the strait reopening. March, he acknowledged, was a painful month, with commodity prices rising roughly twenty-five percent across the board and oil prices climbing close to seventy-five percent, but he said the speed of the decline is likely to mirror the speed of the rise once supply constraints are lifted.
On the political landscape heading toward the November midterms, Moore said the picture is less dire for Republicans than the generic ballot polling suggests. While Republicans trail on generic congressional preference by three to five points in most surveys, a gap Moore noted is within or close to the margin of error, they hold actual advantages on specific issues that tend to drive vote decisions, including border security, national security, and affordability. He also pointed to a Gallup survey showing that average American concern across sixteen major national issues has fallen to its lowest level since 2020, dropping from forty-six percent expressing great concern in March of last year to forty-three percent now, a result he said reflects public fatigue with the relentless alarm from the political left rather than any genuine deterioration in conditions.
Moore raised a communications problem he said Republicans need to address urgently on the big beautiful tax bill. When pollsters ask Americans whether they support a large tax cut that benefited the wealthy, majorities say no. When those same respondents are told specifically that the bill eliminated taxes on tips, reduced taxes on overtime pay, provided Social Security benefit recipients with tax relief, and gave businesses accelerated deductions for capital investment, support rises substantially. He said many Americans have already seen the effect in larger paychecks without connecting it to the legislation, and that Republicans need to be far more aggressive in making that connection explicitly rather than ceding the framing to Democrats who have characterized the bill as a giveaway to the rich.
The conversation turned to the expanding benefits fraud investigations being driven in part by JD Vance and a Justice Department task force, following on the work of citizen investigator Nick Shirley in Minnesota, whose low-cost method of simply knocking on doors of addresses registered as daycare, hospice, or autism service providers and finding no clients or staff has now been replicated by Fox News in California. A Republican assemblywoman there assisted with an investigation finding eighty-nine hospice companies registered to a single Los Angeles address, with no employees or patients visible despite the companies billing Medicare for services. Moore said the scale of the fraud reflects a deliberate indifference on the part of blue state governments, which he argued view fraudulent federal program billing as a form of economic stimulus since the money flows from federal taxpayers into their states regardless of whether services are actually rendered. He said the people exposing the fraud, like Shirley, are being treated as villains while the people perpetrating it face minimal consequences, a reversal he described as genuinely enraging and said the only appropriate response is criminal prosecution and imprisonment, not just recovery of stolen funds.
Moore also addressed a Trump administration initiative to expand the range of investment options available within 401k plans, specifically allowing participants to allocate a portion of their retirement savings to private equity and other alternative investments that have historically been accessible only to institutional investors and the wealthy. He said the change should accelerate growth in retirement accounts by giving ordinary workers access to the same high-return early-stage investment opportunities that have driven wealth creation for institutional investors, while still maintaining overall portfolio diversification. He closed by returning to what he called the most important retirement policy question of all, arguing that allowing Americans under forty-five to redirect twelve percent of their payroll taxes away from Social Security and into personal investment accounts would transform retirement outcomes. The average lifetime Social Security benefit for someone his age, he said, amounts to roughly three hundred thousand dollars, while the same contributions invested in an index fund over a forty-year career would have produced approximately one million dollars, a gap he said represents one of the most consequential policy failures in American domestic history.