In response to reports that President Donald Trump would unveil a plan to reduce the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 15 percent, discredited economic pundit Stephen Moore rushed to praise the budget busting corporate giveaway while misleadingly claiming that the tax cuts will help pay for themselves by boosting economic activity.

On April 24, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump would release a tax plan on Wednesday focused on cutting the maximum statutory corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent -- a 20 percent cut the White House is demanding regardless of the implications it would have for the federal budget deficit. The Journal also reported that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin made the unfounded claim that the tax cut will “pay for itself with economic growth.”

Economist Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and who served as economic adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden, called the assertion that Trump’s tax cut would pay for itself “empirically phony” and argued that there is no correlation between cutting taxes and boosting economic growth. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman derisively referred to Trump’s trickle-down economic agenda as “voodoo economics” and laid out examples of tax cuts failing to generate growth under previous administrations. Krugman also noted that former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both raised taxes in order to generate sustainable new tax revenues without undermining the growing economy. He concluded by saying that the extreme cuts Trump would propose is the same “voodoo” Republicans have promoted for decades “with extra bad math.”

On April 25, the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation posted an analysis of the Trump administration’s claims that the tax cut would pay for itself, concluding that the economy could not grow enough to offset the losses in revenue. According to the Tax Foundation’s charitable analysis, cutting corporate tax rates to just 15 percent would stoke economic growth by less than half as much as would be needed to make up for lost revenue and result in long-term deficit increase of at least hundreds of billions of dollars. Those conclusions follow an earlier analysis of Trump’s corporate tax proposal by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which on October 18 found that Trump’s corporate tax agenda alone would reduce federal revenue by $207.6 billion in 2018 and by roughly $2.4 trillion over ten years.

The idea that tax cuts pay for themselves has been thoroughly debunked by years of research. Yet Moore heaped praise on Trump’s plan while parroting unfounded claims that it would grow the economy and benefit all Americans. On the April 25 edition of CNN’s New Day, Moore pushed Trump’s tax plan claiming it would create a “feedback effect” leading to growth. Moore also published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that day promoting the plan while claiming Trump’s tax agenda would help the American economy reach the arbitrary and unrealistic 3 percent annual growth target so-cherished by conservative pundits. On the April 26 edition of New Day, Moore continued his push for the tax cuts only to be debunked by economist and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman, who reminded Moore that “this plan would actually hurt our economic growth” by adding trillions of dollars to the federal debt reducing long-term economic growth:

Ever since CNN hired Moore, he has harmed the network’s credibility by spewing lies about the economy while peddling whatever policies are being pushed by the Trump administration. He routinely peddles partisan economic misinformation while being debunked by more reliable experts and his only purpose at the network seems to be recycling right-wing media talking points.