Washington—
Participants in a major summit on reducing the national debt this week were encouraged to “Ask for a plan!” from the 2016 presidential candidates. As it turns out, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump really have one.
Top aides to the two likely presidential nominees appeared at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Fiscal Summit Wednesday, where they struggled to articulate how their candidate would bring the country out of the red. Clinton economic adviser David Kamin rejected the notion that she should “prioritize debt reduction” at all.
“The federal deficit is an important issue. That’s why she’s put out a proposal that does not add at all to the deficit,” Kamin said. “But we have other deficits in this country.”
He used that last line multiple times, arguing that the federal government needs to borrow and spend on infrastructure, education, health care, and paid family and medical leave. When asked whether Clinton has any ideas to rein in spending, Kamin only repeated the need to control health care costs without touching entitlement programs.
“There are multiple priorities. To just say that we’re going to cut back an entitlement without recognizing what it does and the other policy goals we have is tremendously shortsighted,” he said.
Donald Trump’s national co-chair Sam Clovis didn’t get a chance to back away from a commitment to reducing the debt, but he did admit to the inconsistency and incoherence of Trump’s statements.
“Policy questions come to him, and he knows exactly what he wants to say,” Clovis said. “I know you’ve been in interviews, certainly I’ve been as well, where what we intend to say is not how it comes out.” Trump simply lacks the “particular vocabulary” to make his fiscal policies understood, Clovis clarified.
So Clovis took a swing at explaining them himself, painting a quite optimistic outlook of how Trump’s plans would make the government money.
“Our proposals, what we think will happen, will lead us in fact to about a $4.5 [trillion] to $7 trillion surplus at the end of 10 years, if all of our initiatives are put in place,” Clovis said. The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, however, found that Trump’s plan would actually cost the government $10 trillion in revenue over a decade, even when accounting for the economic growth of his proposal.
Former budget officials of both parties weren’t kind to either candidate. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist for President George H.W. Bush and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, called Trump’s ideas “unthinkable,” explaining that the consequences of toying with the interest on our national debt would be even worse than the interest’s continued growth. And Eakin’s co-panelist, fellow former CBO director and current Clinton supporter Robert Reischauer, solemnly discouraged Clinton’s proposed Medicare expansion.
“The history books won’t be kind,” he said.
Lindsey Graham, who spoke prior to Kamin and Clovis, balked at both campaigns for lacking sensible plans to reduce the debt.
“Of all the things we’ve talked about in the election cycle, the debt has been the least talked about, the most important,” he pointed out. “Isn’t it amazing?”
