Fox News Anchor Concedes Trump’s Budget Bill ‘Does Run Up the Debt’
Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner spoke to Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis as the U.S. Senate narrowly passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill, which is projected to add at least $3 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years.
“You were telling us what happens if the bill passes. You had some good news for us. It does run up the debt, so talk about that,” Faulkner began.
“Yeah, so I was putting it in context of what people would gain if the bill passes. That’s the benefit of the tax cuts, the Trump tax cuts from 2017. That extension is really important, but on the debt side, we definitely have some issues. Now I know CBO scoring isn’t always the way to go, but apples to apples. The amount added to the national debt of the Senate version of the bill is substantially higher than what the House had crafted,” DeAngelis explained, adding:
And that’s what I think the salient point here is and what some of the arguing back and forth is about. Nobody wants to add to the national debt, especially with interest rates where they are. We already pay a trillion dollars a year to service that debt. However, if you are a student of Reagan economics and you think back to the 80s and Reagan’s policies, which are very similar to Trump’s. The answer to those folks is that we are going to grow our way out of it. You stimulate the economy. You cut taxes for people and businesses. That gets the engine going. That pays for what they’re saying will be added to the national debt.
Faulkner replied with a lengthy takedown of CBO scoring, “All right, I want to come back to this idea of the CBO scoring because we put together a list, and this will be the second day we show it because I think it’s that important. So the CBO’s current law baseline assumes that the 2017 tax cuts that Trump put into place during his first term will go away, that this bill will fail.”
“So that’s what it’s assuming when they put together that over $3 trillion new deficit over 10 years. So, let’s take a look at the times when it hasn’t worked out. Some recent examples of where the CBO has been wrong,” Faulkner continued, adding:
The committee missed the amount of revenue raised from Trump’s 2017 tax cuts by $2.3 trillion. It predicted the Inflation Reduction Act would save billions when it actually ended up costing $400 billion in deficits. It also predicted, this is the CBO score where it has failed in the past, it has also predicted more than double the actual number of Obamacare enrollments. That is a huge point in history. That cost the country huge — not to have had a really good CBO score on that. So I’m not saying that it’s always wrong, I’m just saying that Republicans have some ground to run on when they say that’s not the only indicator.
“Absolutely, and what they can do is crunch the numbers as they are right now. What they can’t predict and what the Republicans can’t give them some tangible evidence of is what the growth will be when all the policies go into place. Also, remember, the president’s been very innovative in his tariff policy, for example, which everyone is critical of. They’ve already raised $100 billion in tariff revenue. That’s amazing. And so they’re doing that with DOGE cuts, and they want to do the gold card program. There are all these little places they’re finding money,” DeAngelis concluded.
Watch the clip above via Fox News.
