Economic adviser to the Trump campaign Stephen Moore responded to critiques of Trump’s published tax plan by underscoring that the campaign’s plan is not “even finalized,” while still pushing a series of confusing claims about the revised plan’s specifics. Moore assured Fox Business’ Charles Payne, however, that he would “love” the new plan.

Moore, a conservative economist and Fox contributor, appeared on the July 15 edition of Fox Business’ Cavuto: Coast to Coast to discuss criticisms of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s tax proposals, which were first rolled out in September and are still currently detailed on the campaign’s website. Moore’s defenses of the plan largely consisted of repeating the Trump talking point that the plan is currently being “revised” and “finalized.” Protesting critiques of the Trump tax plan already made public, Moore complained “it’s like declaring the New York Yankees the winner in a game after the fifth inning -- I mean, the game isn’t over yet because we haven’t put [the plan] together.”

Payne and Moore rehashed that Donald Trump would be “hands off” on entitlements and is not interested in cutting “social security, medicare.” Payne then claimed Trump “is going to double the size of the military” -- an assertion Moore was unsure about.  Moore claimed the Trump tax plan would stimulate the economy “from 2 percent growth to 4 percent” by slashing taxes and that these tax cuts will be paid for by that growth and by cutting federal spending dramatically:

Moore argued that economists and critics pointing out that the numbers of the current plan don’t add up “don’t know what they are talking about,” because it is being revised. The plan, as it stands now, has been panned by economists.  

Moore’s claim that tax cuts will be balanced by cuts in spending do not, in fact, add up: The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC) and the conservative Tax Foundation each scored the current tax plan and found that that it would explode the deficit by $9 to $12 trillion over the next decade, on top of the $9.4 trillion in projected deficits at current spending levels. Trump would need to cut almost one trillion dollars in federal spending per year, which is more than all non-military discretionary spending.

The Tax Foundation’s analysis concluded that Trump’s current tax plan would boost investment and wage growth while creating up to 5.3 million new jobs, but those figures relied on a so-called “dynamic” scoring model that has been criticized for overestimating the stimulative value of tax cuts. According to a September 2014 report from the Brookings Institution, tax cuts do not necessarily create economic growth and they can even discourage growth by undermining economic incentives to invest. A September 2012 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which was suppressed by Senate Republicans, similarly found no correlation between tax cuts and economic growth, but it did caution that tax cuts for high-income individuals “appear to be associated” with rising inequality.

Moore has a long and well-documented history of distorting facts on the economy. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has spent years documenting Moore's repeated failures in economic policy, recently slammed the right-wing commentator’s “impressive lack of even minimal technical competence” upon learning the economist would be involved in re-working Trump’s tax proposals.