Another Way to View the Presidential Candidates

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As regular readers of this blog well know, I constantly advocate for two major changes in government policy:

  • Speeding up economic growth, which has averaged an anemic 2.1% per year since the end of the Great Recession in June 2009. This will create the new and higher paying jobs that country so badly needs.
  • Shrinking annual deficits, ideally down to zero, so that our huge public debt (on which we pay interest) will begin to decrease as a percentage of GDP over time.

My last post compared the President’s proposed budget for 2017 with a proposal from the House Budget Committee. Basically the President’s budget increases both taxes and spending while the House budget keeps revenues at a steady 18.2% and leads to a balanced budget after ten years.
Capture2The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has just produced an interesting report, ”How Much More Would Government Spend Under the Next President?” It compares the spending plans of the remaining five presidential candidates from both parties.  It finds that:

  • Only John Kasich would actually decrease spending over the next decade from 22.1% of GDP (under current law) to 21.5%.
  • The other four candidates would all increase spending: Hillary Clinton (to 22.5%), Donald Trump (to 22.7%), Ted Cruz (to 23.4) and Bernie Sanders (to 29.5%).

Mr. Kasich’s spending restraint would amount to a 2% decrease over current law while Ms. Clinton, for example, would increase spending by 2%.
As I showed a year ago,  reining in spending by 2% per year over current law is a major achievement and will lead to a balanced budget in ten years. In other words, Mr. Kasich’s spending plans are in sync with the latest House Budget Committee proposal.  Perhaps this should not be surprising since Mr. Kasich served as Chair of this House Committee in the 1990s!
Easy question: Which presidential candidate and which chamber of Congress are acting in the most fiscally responsible manner?

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