Liz Claman: Both Biden and Trump are a 'little bit' in 'fantasyland' with economic plans

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President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are both a “little bit” in “fantasyland” as it pertains to their economic plans heading into the 2020 presidential election, FOX Business anchor Liz Claman told “The Fox News Rundown” on Wednesday.

“Both Biden and Donald Trump are definitely up-playing and downplaying,” the host of "The Claman Countdown" also said.

She added, “Right now it's every candidate out for themselves and any kind of narrative that you can skew against your opponent is going to be the path that both of these people take.”

“He says it is time to raise taxes on big corporations who got a very generous tax cut,” Claman said.

She also pointed to the fact that Biden said that if he wins the presidency in November's election, he will raise taxes on Americans who earn more than $400,000 a year.

In an interview with ABC’s David Muir that aired Sunday, Biden discussed his plan for raising taxes that included this segment of the population and appeared to include businesses as well.

“I will raise taxes for anybody making over $400,000,” Biden said. “Let me tell you why I'm going to do it. It’s about time they start paying a fair share of the economic responsibility we have. The very wealthy should pay a fair share — corporations should pay a fair share.”

Biden referred to businesses that take in "close to a trillion dollars and pay no tax at all."

After saying this, Muir questioned the wisdom of burdening businesses with new taxes while the economy needs to recover from the coronavirus crisis.

"It’s smart to tax businesses that, in fact, are making excessive amounts of money and paying no taxes," Biden said.

Biden said that there would be no new taxes for small businesses or individuals who earn $400,000 or less.

President Trump warned in a recent FOX Business interview that a Biden presidency would bring about the "biggest tax increase in history."

On Wednesday, Claman noted that “President Trump has been in tax cut mode,” adding “who doesn't want their taxes cut?”

“However, we're looking at a ballooning deficit,” she went on to point out.

In fact, June saw the federal government’s largest monthly budget deficit to date as coronavirus relief programs exploded and tax revenue was slashed by millions of job losses.

Last month the Treasury Department said that the deficit hit $864 billion in June, an amount that surpassed most annual deficits in the nation’s history. The gap for the entire previous fiscal year was $984 billion. The previous monthly deficit record was April with $738 billion.

“We are looking at a strange Dickensian moment here, a tale of two cities,” Claman said. “We have such an incredible rebound in certain areas, such as the stock market, but we still have so many people unemployed, 16.3 million total unemployed, and that's just the ones that are gauged by unemployment or jobless benefits.”

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Claman said that “a lot of people” are “suffering,” noting that “people will be evicted soon, people are asking for forbearance on their mortgages and who knows, are we going to start to see mass foreclosures if people are jobless and can't pay their mortgage?”

“So I think it's a little bit on both sides here where they're in fantasyland,” she continued.

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Host Lisa Brady then pointed to Biden’s argument that President Trump inherited a good economic foundation from former President Obama and that Trump “has mainly helped big corporations and the wealthy with his cuts.”

Claman noted that President Obama “inherited the worst economy of our generation” and said under his presidency “the economy recovered,” but “took a very long time.”

She said Obama was able to hand “a lighter baton to President Trump, who took that baton and continued to run just as quickly with it, if not faster.”

“So he built upon what President Obama handed him and then we started to see record after record for the stock market,” Claman continued. “We saw major job creation, which is definitely welcome.”

In September, just months before the coronavirus pandemic was declared in the U.S., unemployment dropped to a 50-year low.

“What we did see when the pandemic hit, which was not President Trump's fault, not the Democrats fault, not anybody in this country's fault certainly… was sort of the revealing of a very upsetting underbelly and that is that people didn't have any savings,” Claman said.

“In fact, many people were working two, three jobs and there were lots of jobs to be had, but were they good-paying jobs? Because after two, three weeks, people were on the unemployment line, they couldn't hold out on to their savings.”

“So I think that we really need to be looking very closely at what's happening now. I don't really care what happened last year, three years ago, eight years ago,” she continued, stressing that “the here and now is really what matters and people are suffering.”

She acknowledged, though, that “many” Americans “are starting to see a comeback and that is definitely an improvement.”

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She pointed to positive economic data saying Americans are seeing an “outdoor equipment boom” and “a housing boom.”

She specifically mentioned the “unbelievable” earnings report from Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc.

The Coraopolis, Penn.-based sporting goods retailer reported record earnings and sales in the three months through June amid strong demand for health and fitness products as customers sheltered at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. earned $276.8 million, or an adjusted $3.21 per share, recouping $28 million of inventory write-downs recorded in the first quarter. Net sales rose 20% from a year earlier to $2.71 billion.

The results outpaced the adjusted earnings of $1.30 per share and revenue of $2.46 billion that Wall Street analysts surveyed by Refinitiv were expecting.

Claman specifically pointed to the fact that online sales soared 194%.

Sales of new single-family homes in the U.S. increased to their highest level in more than 13 years in July as the housing market continues to show strong immunity to the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters reported, citing data from the Commerce Department.

This week, the Commerce Department announced that new home sales rose 13.9% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 901,000 units last month, the highest level since December 2006.

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Claman stressed that while economic data is showing that there are some bright spots during the coronavirus pandemic, America is certainly not in the clear just yet.

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“We’ve got a stock market boom, but we got a forbearance boom as well, people having a lot of trouble paying their mortgages, people are having a lot of trouble paying their bills,” Claman said, highlighting the contrast.

Fox News’ Ronn Blitzer, Morgan Phillips, Jonathan Garber and Evie Fordham contributed to this report.

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The FOX NEWS RUNDOWN is a news-based daily morning podcast delivering a deep dive into the major and controversial stories of the day.