Either Trump or Harris Will Worsen Washington’s Overspending Problem

If you want to understand Washington’s fiscal profligacy, this chart based on OMB data shows what has happened to the federal budget over the past 15 years.

There are two big things to understand.

• We had some very admirable spending restraint from 2009-2014 when Republicans were influenced by the “Tea Party.”
• Under Trump and Biden, the spending burden has grown much faster (even if we ignore the orgy of COVID spending).

Unfortunately, it is likely that the next four years will be just as bad as the past eight years. That’s because both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are big spenders.

Not only are they unwilling to deal with the looming entitlement crisis, they want to make a bad situation even worse with additional schemes to expand the burden of government.

I wrote about this issue today for the U.K.-based Telegraph. Here are some excerpts from my column.

The 2024 fiscal year just ended in Washington and federal spending reached a record of more than $6.8 trillion. That’s nearly twice as much as Washington spent just 10 years earlier, a staggering expansion in the burden of government. Some fiscal restraint is desperately needed, but that will not happen anytime soon. Both major presidential candidates are proposing to spend more money… Donald Trump wants about $1 trillion more spending over the next 10 years and…Kamala Harris wants about $4 trillion of additional spending. …all of this new spending is in addition to the spending increases that already are part of the “baseline”. To be more specific, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the burden of federal spending will climb to more than $10.3 trillion by 2034 if government is left on autopilot. …Responsible politicians would be proposing to reform entitlements as part of an agenda of spending restraint. But responsible is not a word to describe either Trump or Harris.

I then make two additional points.

First, the new spending would be bad, regardless of whether it is paid for with taxes, borrowing, or money printing.

Second, we need another Ronald Reagan. Or even Bill Clinton.

Here are the relevant passages.

All of these spending increases (by both candidates) would be bad news for the American economy, regardless of whether they are financed by higher taxes, more borrowing, or money printing. …The bottom line is that the United States needs another Ronald Reagan. Or, to be bipartisan, another Bill Clinton. Both of those presidents did a decent job of limiting spending growth.

By the way, the data in my Telegraph column came from a new report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

That report focused on how the plans of both candidates would produce more debt.

But that’s the symptom rather than the problem. So I put the focus on the burden of spending, which is where it belongs.