The National Taxpayers’ Union has researched the economic and budget proposals of eight candidates for president, both Republican and Democrat. They find that all of the five major candidates still standing would increase federal spending — by a range of $7 billion to $287 billion annually. Interestingly, the most frugal of the three leading Republicans is John McCain — who would increase spending by just $7 billion. Even Ron Paul — a former Libertarian candidate for President — would trim the federal budget by just $150 billion. With total federal spending of about $2.93 trillion, that represents a cut of about 5 percent — a drop in the bucket by libertarian standards. On the Democratic side, both Obama and Clinton agree on the need to increase spending — Clinton by $218 billion, and Obama by $287. That latter figure would amount to a spending increase of about 10 percent annually. The big difference among the candidates is where their increased spending would come from: almost to a man, the Republican candidates propose significant increases in defense and national security spending. Clinton and Obama want to pump up spending on domestic priorities. Ron Paul and Barack Obama both stand out in NTU’s analysis, for contrasting reasons: Obama wants to spend so much more in general that he throws almost $30 billion more at national defense, in addition to $260 billion more for health care and other programs. Paul, by contrast, would chop both domestic and national security spending relatively evenly. As a conservative, it’s disappointing that among all the Republican candidates — all the men trying to argue that the federal government spent too much over the last 8 years — only Ron Paul actually proposes an overall spending reduction. On another point, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney proposes more than twice as much new spending as does Senator McCain.
