Robert Reich smacks down ex-CBO head over GOP tax bill: 'Trickle-down economics on steroids!'

CNN's "Out Front" featured an economic debate on the Republican tax bill, between former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

"You heard the White House again defending the president's claim that this bill hurts him. But a couple of facts here, Forbes is estimating that this, the president himself could benefit to the tune of $11 million based on the most recent tax return we have seen, of course, from 2005. We don't have the whole picture here. How do you respond to that?" anchor Jim Sciutto asked.

"It's hard to imagine this doesn't help him personally. The only story you can tell is one where he has such enormous tax losses from past losses on his business that he has no taxable income on his passthrough part and he's not making that much at the white house and donating most of it to charity, but it's a pretty implausible story," Holtz-Eakin explained. "As you said, if we had his tax returns, we would know the facts. We don't, it seems really unlikely to me."

"Robert, the claim here from Republicans is this is going to add to growth, you're going to put more money in the hands of corporations and the middle class is going to get a cut as well. What's your response?" Sciutto asked.

"There's no evidence that has ever been the case, Jim. The way you grow the economy is you invest in people, you invest in education, and job skills. You invest in their health, you invest in infrastructure that binds us together, Reich explained. "And this bill is actually not only not doing that, it's going to make it harder in the future to make those kinds of investments in our trickle-down economics on steroids."

"This is an example of the kind of worst Republican kind of thinking," Reich argued. "You give big corporations big tax breaks, you give billionaires and real estate developers big tax breaks, and somehow that's going to help everybody else and make the economy large and grow.

"Well, it's just not going to happen," Reich predicted. "In fact, quite the opposite."

"I asked a pretty basic question. Is there evidence that past big tax cuts actually measurably added to growth?" Sciutto asked Holtz-Eakin.

"We have never done this before, so there is no past evidence on this experiment," Holtz-Eakin admitted.

"You know, we have had a precursor for this, and it shows that there is absolutely no positive outcome," Reich concluded. "We're going to have a $1.5 trillion addition to the debt."

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