Alexander Hamilton would cry. Trump’s tutors at Penn Wharton say his projected budget deficits will be enormous.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said yesterday: “hands down, VP Harris is being much more fiscally disciplined than President Trump.”
Zandi has it right and yesterday’s posting by the Penn Wharton business school backs him up, but first, some historical perspective.
I suspect that our grand old founding dad Alexander Hamilton (seen above in a public domain image posted on wikimedia commons), the first secretary of the treasury, would cry if he saw the budget deficits we’re ringing up these days. He’d be especially chagrined by the disregard for fiscal discipline that has been the hallmark and history of Donald Trump, who ballooned the national debt while in office and threatens to make the red ink even deeper if he wins a second term.
Hamilton, of course, actually invited responsible debt, but added the caveat that “debt is a national blessing … if it is not excessive.”
So what would our revered Founding Father think about Donald Trump’s propensity for spending beyond our means? Don’t bother asking Trump and his supporters, who appear to have totally abandoned what used to be a GOP abhorrence of debt.
Of some irony, Democrat Kamala Harris, representing the party that usually gets blamed for overspending, is the candidate of fiscal discipline this time around.
The highly regarded Penn Wharton School of Finance, where Donald Trump got a postgraduate degree, yesterday released a budget model comparing federal budget deficits created by the respective candidates’ proposals. Trump comes out looking like the excessive deficit-creating machine that he’s always been. Says Wharton, the model is a “brief guide to our analyses of the candidates’ policy proposals. These analyses project the policy proposals’ fiscal, distributional, and economic effects. These analyses only include proposals that are detailed enough to score, and so coverage may differ between candidates.”
That qualifier acknowledges that there is more to look at eventually, but that at this stage of the campaign the picture that is emerging isn’t a pretty one of Trump. Its conclusion? If you think red ink is an evil, Donald Trump is by far – by very, very far – the worse of two evils. Wharton finds that at this point, it looks like the Harris primary deficit will be something on the order of $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, while Trump’s primary deficit will exceed that by a whopping factor of 5 —$5.8 trillion — during the coming decade.
You can get a more specific and detailed analysis by linking to the report.
If you do, budgetary differences between the Trump and Biden/Harris administrations should give you an idea why Wharton’s conclusions don’t come as much of a surprise.
The non-partisan/non-profit Committee for a Responsible Budget compared the amount of debt approved by the two administrations, reporting last June that Trump approved $8.4 trillion in red ink, compared to Biden’s $4.3 trillion.
Trump, who once bragged “I’m the king of debt,” certainly earned his crown while president.
It’s little wonder that Mark Zandi, the chief economist at global financial research giant Moody’s Analytics, told NBC yesterday that “hands down, VP Harris is being much more fiscally disciplined than President Trump.”
I suppose that if there is a “wonder” to be found in all of this, it’s that so many Republicans, who historically have been identified as budget hawks, wary of any deficits in sight, are mesmerized by their party leader, who has shown that he doesn’t give a hoot about fiscal discipline.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
