Fox & Friends Defends Trump’s Infeasible “Trickle-Down” Tax Plan

Fox Staunchly Defending Myth That Tax Cuts Create Economic Growth

Fox & Friends attempted to defend Republican nominee Donald Trump's budget-busting tax plan by pushing the discredited claim that his proposed tax cuts for the rich and for corporations would stimulate economic growth.

On October 11, Fox & Friends was joined by Fox Business host Stuart Varney to discuss Trump’s tax cuts, which, according to Varney, will “get 4 percent growth within a couple of years.” After Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade pressed Varney about criticism of how much additional debt would be incurred under Trump’s “trickle-down” tax plan, Varney admitted it would “initially” increase federal deficit before speculating that, “over the longer term, the deficit, I think, comes down.” Varney also claimed Trump’s plan “is cutting taxes across the board” -- failing to mention that his cuts overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of taxpayers, with almost nothing for working- and middle-class Americans. From the October 11 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends:

Fox & Friends has hosted Varney before to push Trump’s “trickle-down” economic policies; on September 28, the show invited Varney to defend Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. He decried Clinton’s assertion at the September 26 presidential debate that Trump’s tax cuts are “Trumped-up trickle-down economics” and claimed Trump’s huge tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans is “how we grow the economy.” Varney continued his defense of Trump’s economic policies on his Fox Business program Varney & Co. later that morning, claiming that, economically speaking, “we are in a mess [and] the only way out is to stimulate private enterprise by tax cuts.”

Fox’s desperate attempt to shore up Trump’s right-wing tax policy comes after economists, experts, and journalists have lampooned the plan’s many flaws. During the September 15 edition of CNN’s The Lead, Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi noted that the job creation and economic growth Trump has promised are “not feasible” without a significant increase of net immigration over the next decade, which Trump vehemently opposes. CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar derided Trump’s reliance on tax cuts to boost economic growth as “magical thinking,” and noted that economists now have “20 years of evidence that this sort of trickle-down theory is not working.” The idea of tax cuts as a means for creating growth has even been debunked by economists on Fox -- including on Varney’s own show. Economist Austan Goolsbee scolded Varney on the April 25 edition of Varney & Co., reminding the Fox host that cutting taxes would not increase growth and arguing instead that they would “choke off the money that you needed to make the investments that are critical to your future grow[th].”

According to a September 2014 report from the Brookings Institution, tax cuts do not always create economic growth and can even discourage growth by undermining economic incentives to invest. A September 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) similarly concluded that reducing top income tax rates does not correlate to increased economic growth, but lowering top rates does “appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”

Varney has attempted to rewrite history before to claim tax cuts created “gigantic” increases in revenue during previous Republican administrations, and Fox has repeatedly pushed debunked trickle-down economic claims. The fact remains that tax cuts for the wealthy guarantee only one thing: lost revenue that could be spent on vital investments that improve the lives of every American.