Austan Goolsbee: Trump Economic Plan is President Bush 2.0

With concerns growing over the sluggish growth of the U.S. economy and job market, the competing economic plans of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton were addressed in the final debate of the 2016 presidential race.  Former Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee weighed in on the state of the economy and the candidates’ differing solutions for the economy.

Goolsbee first addressed the current state of the economy.

“We’ve been growing, if you don’t take one quarter, if you take the broader averages, we’ve been growing about 2% to 2.25% for some number of years.  That’s okay, that’s not great, I’m not going to say obviously that that’s a tremendously high growth rate.  It is higher than the rest of the advanced economies in the world,” Goolsbee told the FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo.

Goolsbee then explained how Hillary Clinton’s plan would lead to economic growth.

“Well, number one, the plan is not just raise taxes on high-income people, it’s use the money to make critical investments that we’ve got bipartisan choruses saying the economy needs, like investing in the economic infrastructure of the country, investing in the training and education of the workforce.  Those are critical investments that we can’t afford to do if we don’t have the money.”

According to Goolsbee, Trump’s plan would be an expansion of the unsuccessful economic plan of President Bush.

“If your idea is that what we need to grow is to cut high-income people’s taxes and deregulate than I think you’ve really got to explain, and this is how the context of George Bush came up, Donald Trump is proposing to do what George Bush did, only even more of it, and it didn’t work when George Bush did it.  So why is it that you think that cutting high-income people’s taxes would give us magic bean stalk beans and start us growing back to the way we were?”

When Bartiromo questioned why American voters should expect a different result from a continuation of President Obama’s economic policy under a Clinton presidency, Goolsbee responded “A, it’s not more of the same.  B, her plan is not just to raise taxes on high-income people.  It’s to use that money to make the critical investments and then those investments are what’s going to lead to growth.”

Goolsbee then compared that to the impact of tax cuts in President George W. Bush’s economic plan.

“If you think that doing the opposite, what George Bush did is what Donald Trump is proposing times three, then why didn’t it work when George Bush did it?”