It’s far too early in the campaign season to bemoan the absence of serious policy proposals from the presidential candidates — but not too soon to set out some parameters of what those proposals, whatever the candidate’s ideology, should be expected to address.Issues of character and judgment matter, whether they involve Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and speaking fees or Jeb Bush’s rearview mirror on Iraq. So do candidates’ takes on the hot-button issues of the day, from immigration reform to trade to Common Core education standards.But in the end, the fundamental question facing the would-be presidents, especially on the domestic front, is what the size and scope of government should be and how its operations should be financed.To that end, a recent exercise by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a fiscal watchdog group, offers a useful set of benchmarks for assessing the candidates. The foundation asked five policy groups from across the ideological spectrum to devise budget proposals that would stabilize the debt while funding their priorities and to write memos to the next president outlining their approaches.The resulting plans present a menu of options — some unexpectedly overlapping, some radically and predictably diverging — prepared by the conservative American Action Forum (AAF) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the centrist Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The nascent 2016 campaign would benefit if candidates were asked to identify which of these plans best expresses their governing priorities — or what their alternative would be…Under current policy, debt held by the public is on track to climb to more than 100 percent of gross domestic product in 25 years, scarily above the current 74 percent of GDP and the 50-year historical average of about 40 percent. The CAP plan would drive the debt down to 46 percent of GDP by 2040 and the EPI plan to 54 percent. Notably, that is less than the 63 percent envisioned by the AEI and the 76 percent forecast by the BPC. By contrast, the most conservative plan, from the AAF, would drive debt below 16 percent of GDP by slashing spending to bare-bones levels.






27 May 2015