David Asman, Austan Goolsbee argue over Trump tax cuts, how it impacted jobs
Former Obama economic adviser claims jobs growth 'had nothing to do with the tax cut'
FOX Business' David Asman and former Obama Economic Council chair Austan Goolsbee went head to head during FOX Business' "Cavuto: Coast to Coast" on Thursday.
Goolsbee, who recently endorsed Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Democratic race for the presidency in 2020, discussed how former Vice President Joe Biden's tax policy is similar to Buttigieg's plan, including taxing capital gains as ordinary income.
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This got Asman and Goolsbee talking about President Trump's tax cuts.
"Donald Trump cut taxes, $2 trillion for high-income people and big corporations, promising massive payouts to the American workers, promising massive increases in the growth rate and in business investment, and none of those things happened," Goolsbee said.
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Asman contended many people would look at the "extraordinary jobs numbers" and companies investing in human capital and would attribute those to Trump's tax cuts.
But Goolsbee said that employment increase "had nothing to do with the tax cut."
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"There wasn't a tax cut for human capital investment," Goolsbee said. "It was a tax cut for business investment and business investment, as you know, has now been six months negative. It's literally shrinking."
Asman disagreed.
"A lot of businesses came back from their tax savings because the corporate rate came down to 21 percent," Asman said.
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Goolsbee accused Asman of "repeating something that is not a fact."
"The investment-to-GDP ratio is lower than it was before they passed the tax cut."
Asman agreed on one aspect of Goolsbee's argument.
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"The increase, for example, in the manufacturing sector has slowed down and, in fact, reversed a little bit, but we had 500,000 new manufacturing jobs in the first two years of the Trump administration -- jobs that we were told were never coming back -- and we've had a decrease in less than 100,000," Asman said.
Workers with Apple products being assembled before President Trump tours an Apple manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File)
However, Goolsbee maintained the increase is "literally negative" and that these changes in employment happened before the tax cut.
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"Yes, before the tax cut, manufacturing was doing well, and since the tax cut, manufacturing has been doing badly," Goolsbee said.
Asman insisted it happened during the tax cuts.
The two ended, deciding to agree to disagree on this one.