The point of running a virtual campaign against President Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination is to focus on issues currently being badly neglected.
The campaign won’t waste time taking shots at Trump, other than to draw sober contrasts with him where necessary for clarity. And, since I’m not actually on any ballot, it won’t waste time touting my own horn as virtual candidate, other than to note that my Madison-Reagan-Kemp conservative bona fides go back more than 40 years. And this Gulf South-based campaign is definitely not emerging from the D.C. “swamp,” figuratively or literally.
So then, on to the issues. This campaign aims to get the policies right, regardless of their initial political popularity. The ultimate attraction of the challenge to Trump will lie in the recognition that the public good, carefully analyzed, is the campaign’s only objective. Voters (especially virtual ones) may appreciate that.
This virtual campaign was launched to handle “debt, decency, and diplomacy.” Debt is deliberately listed first. On the domestic front, no other challenge threatens systemic collapse the way the combination of public and private debt does. The danger isn’t that today’s unprecedented federal peacetime government debt — 106% of gross domestic product — will, by itself, cause catastrophe. The problem is that if the economy, culture, or public safety experiences a major shock, the debt is already too high to provide any cushion. Indeed, the high debt would exacerbate the situation, causing more panic and possible disaster.
One more 9/11 or another financial system crisis can ruin us now in ways against which we no longer will be able to “spend ourselves well.” The Trump presidency has made the debt danger far worse, especially considering that it is occurring during a time of prosperity rather than recession.
So, what would a Virtual President Hillyer do to handle federal debt? Future columns will flesh it out, but here’s an overview.
The first step should be to buy time for Social Security and Medicare, the biggest debt drivers of all, before they go belly up. I recognize that the plan I outlined several months ago would extend the life of each program by only a decade or so. Still, even a decade would help. It would allow time to build consensus for far larger systemic reforms, to be adopted in a second term after trust has been established. In sum, the first-term reforms would nibble the edges of several aspects of the formulas governing these entitlements, without altering financial behavior to the detriment of economic growth.
The second step is to start applying to food stamps and other welfare-like programs, and to Medicaid, many of the same policies that succeeded in the major “welfare reform” law that fixed what had been known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Plus, we need to re-invigorate those 1996 reforms, because half of that law was gutted under President Barack Obama.
Third, we must once again control domestic discretionary spending, to save as much as $400 billion in four years. How? By setting unyielding parameters, backed by a hard-and-fast veto threat. The presidential message to Congress should be that each domestic Appropriations bill must come in on its own power, not as part of a multi-agency “omnibus” package. Any omnibus or mini-bus will be vetoed. Period.
Furthermore, each domestic department and agency — every single one — must feature at least a 2% cut from 2020 levels, rather than rising substantially as currently planned. Any appropriations bill that exceeds that limit will be vetoed, full stop. And, in the subsequent three years, that exact same, lower level will be maintained. No adjustment for inflation, or for any other reason. Congress is free to adjust spending levels downward or upward within agency accounts, but the overall, topline bill for each agency must not rise.
Congress actually achieved far better than these proposed savings, both under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and during the first two years of the Gingrich interregnum in the 1990s. What is lacking now is will and discipline. The virtual presidency will provide it.
Of course the long-term goal is a balanced budget, but Presidents Bush-43, Obama, and Trump, and most of the Congresses that served with them, have put that out of reach within a four-year window. Here, though, is a reasonable, and crucial, goal: Reduce total federal debt (not just debt “held by the public”) to below 75% of gross domestic product. This means the economy must grow faster than the debt does. The spending restraints outlined above, combined with existing pro-growth policies and continuing regulatory reform, should achieve that end.
It’s a doable goal. It would get federal debt back within manageable levels, underneath the danger zone.
