Kevin Hassett to critics of Trump’s tax overhaul: If tax cuts didn’t cause job growth, ‘was it the Martians?’

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Kevin Hassett to critics of Trump’s tax overhaul: If tax cuts didn’t create job growth, ‘was it the Martians?’

Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Kevin Hassett claims President Trump’s tax overhaul helped promote job growth saying, “The question I would ask a critic of the tax cuts, if it wasn't the tax cuts and it wasn’t our deregulation, then what was it? Was it the Martians?”

Hassett asked the question on “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday in response to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ comments during a Fox News town hall Monday, when the 2020 presidential hopeful urged President Trump to release his tax returns on the same day he released 10 years of his own tax information.

At the fiery town hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, sparks flew almost immediately, as the Vermont senator defiantly refused to explain why he would not voluntarily pay the massive new 52 percent "wealth tax" that he advocated imposing on the nation's richest individuals.

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For his part, Hassett said, “The thing that I would actually, if I had been at a town hall meeting with anyone who is a critic of our policies... the thing that I would remind folks, and I think it’s important to remind folks now, is that if you go back to 2016, The Congressional Budget Office, it’s nonpartisan, it forecasted what 2018, last year, would look like and they said that the economy that President Trump inherited would create 58,000 jobs a month. If you look at what we did last year, we created about 206,000 jobs a month and so there’s a big, big increase in growth and job creation and wages that must be explained by something.”

He then asked if “Martians” or “Magic Sauce” were responsible for the dramatic increase in job creation.

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President Trump spent his tax filing day in Minnesota, where he touted the $1.5 trillion package of corporate and individual tax cuts he signed into law in 2017.

When asked if he thinks the president will ever release his tax returns, Hassett said the “president will make that decision on his own.”

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He added, “It goes back to the election and I think if the American people were concerned about it, he wouldn't be president.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.