WASHINGTON–U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Sunday joined Fox News Sunday to discuss the economy and Vice President Kamala Harris’ agenda for supporting the middle class. In his discussion with Shannon Bream, Murphy emphasized the contrast between Harris’ commitment to expanding opportunities for working Americans and Donald Trump's record of prioritizing tax cuts for the wealthy.

Murphy highlighted how Harris’ economic proposals, unlike those of Trump, would lower the cost of living and create opportunities for all Americans: “She just proposed a massive tax cut for small businesses, she’s proposed a massive investment in housing to bring the cost of rent and mortgages down for Americans, she's going to go after price gougers to try and make sure we continue to drive inflation down, she wants an expansion of the child tax credit—she's investing in the middle class. She’s talked about an opportunity agenda where everybody has the chance to succeed, which is very different than Donald Trump's agenda. Donald Trump has made it very clear: if you put him back in power, he’s going to think about only one group of people and that's his friends at Mar-a-Lago, another massive tax cut for the richest people in America.”

He continued: “I don't doubt that Kamala Harris will continue to roll out proposals to invest in small businesses, to invest in the middle class. I think the contrast is pretty striking between a candidate on the Democratic side who wants to make sure that we grow the economy from the middle out, and Donald Trump who still believes in this magical thinking of trickle-down economics, where if you give him and his friends billions of dollars, eventually that’ll find its way down to everybody else. That’s just not how it works.”

Murphy underscored the differences between Donald Trump’s poor economic record and the historic growth achieved under the leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: “Under this administration we have seen record job growth in this country, we have manufacturing booming, unemployment at a record low. When Donald Trump left office, we had unemployment at a record high. We were going to rebuild the manufacturing sector under Donald Trump. We lost manufacturing jobs. So there is a clear contrast between Donald Trump’s record as president, where our economy fell to pieces, and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, who have rebuilt the economy and driven down inflation at a rate faster than all of our other high-income nation competitors.”

Murphy praised the success of the Inflation Reduction Act, drawing a sharp contrast with Trump's failure to rein in corporate power: “The minute we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, inflation started to decrease at stunning levels in this country. That piece of legislation is growing manufacturing jobs all over the country, it is cutting prescription drug costs for the senior citizens. I'm proud of the fact that we are doing our part to try to clean up the environment. I’m proud that that legislation finally took on the drug industry and said we are not going to put seniors in a position where they go bankrupt because of their prescription drug costs. Donald Trump was in office for four years. He did nothing to take power away from the drug industry. Prescription drug prices skyrocketed under Donald Trump. The Inflation Reduction Act, for the first time, did something about transferring power from the drug industry to regular people.”

“That's the difference between these two candidates,” he continued. “Donald Trump is going to put power in the hands of big corporations, he's promised the big oil industry that he will do anything they want as long as they donate a billion dollars to his reelection campaign, Kamala Harris says that she’s going to continue to take power away from the big oil companies, the big drug companies, the big insurance companies, and put that power back in the hands of regular people.”

On Harris’s plan to ensure wealthy corporations pay their fair share, Murphy said: “People want tax fairness in this country. They are sick and tired of these massive American companies paying 0% tax rates. That’s what some of the biggest companies in the country were paying—zero—under Donald Trump. There is nobody in this country, Republicans or Democrats, that think that’s fair, except for Donald Trump. So yes, Kamala Harris believes that if you’re a corporation in this country, you should pay some taxes. Yes, she believes that if you're making a billion dollars in this economy, you should help pay for our schools, you should help try to make our communities safer. I don’t think Americans believe this argument that by raising taxes by a couple percentage points on a handful of billionaires, that that ultimately is going to ruin the economy. Kamala Harris also says that she is going to cut taxes on small businesses. She’s going to use the money that we raise in higher taxes for billionaires and transfer that to tax cuts for small businesses and lower income taxpayers.”

###