Natasha Sarin

Natasha Sarin (born 1989) is an American law professor, who is currently one of the co-founders of The Budget Lab at Yale. She is also known for serving as the deptuty assistant secretary for economic policy (and later as counselor) to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at the United States Treasury Department; and as the assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Quotes Every analysis of increased tariffs, both those we have published at The Budget Lab and from others, finds the same thing: tariffs make Americans poorer. American consumers pay the cost of tariffs in the form of higher prices. Tackling waste, fraud, and abuse would mean going to the agencies that administer spending themselves — not the BFS. These are achievable goals. While the challenges we face are significant, they are not insurmountable. taken from an interview with Yale Law School, 25 February 2025 The current system really doesn’t work well for people who are lower income in our society because we have banks that charge them exorbitant fees. Consumers then don’t want to go to banks because of those fees and instead turn to alternatives like payday lenders, which end up charging even higher fees. You have this regulatory intervention that may have been well-intentioned to help consumers, but overall consumers are actually being hurt. Although there were a lot of people who were going to go into corporate law or who were interested in financial institutions, the nature of the classes, because they were situated in the law school, was that you didn’t do a lot of the things that you would do in a core finance course: understanding balance sheets, thinking through whether an investment opportunity makes sense, testing whether a firm experienced abnormal returns when its earnings were announced. I’m excited about being part and parcel of the experience for students that are thinking through this next stage of their careers. What is most exciting about Penn is that it feels like a community where those sorts of relationships are organically developed. The parts of law school that I loved most were the relationships I had with my classmates and the relationships I had with faculty, many of whom are my mentors and advisors that I still look up to tremendously in my own career. I’m really excited about being that kind of person, I hope, to this next generation of law students. taken from an interview with the University of Pennsylvania's Carey Law School, 6 September 2018 They still had the last mile to go, but they were directionally there. The labor market was strong. And then President Trump took office. We’re going to see an inflation uptick, and we’re going to see a weaker labor market as a result of all that has already been done. And all this gets to the question that I have really struggled with — and still can’t quite answer for you now: What exactly are the tariffs for? What is the point of the tariffs? How do we measure success for this new ordering of global trade? The idea that taking a tariff rate of 1.5 percent and turning it into a tariff rate of 15 percent plus is somehow a win for Americans — I’m just baffled by the concept. Because no one would say that if you took the sales tax on certain goods and you increased it 15-fold, that was a win for Americans. But effectively, that’s what we’ve done. taken from an interview with the New York Times, 16 August 2025 External links Category:Women born in the 1980s Category:Women_in_law Category:Women academics from the United States