2016 presidential candidates on budgets

2016 Presidential Election Date: November 8, 2016

Candidates Winner: Donald Trump (R) Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates

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The overview of the issue below was current as of the 2016 election.
When Gallup asked Americans to name the "most important problem facing the country" in February 2016, 17 percent said the economy. Just six percent named the federal budget deficit as the country's most important problem. Americans ranked the deficit below the problems of government, immigration, jobs, national security, and terrorism in that survey. At its peak in 2013, 72 percent of Americans said reducing the deficit was a top priority. Indeed, only the economy and jobs ranked higher in priority. Priorities shifted during President Obama's second term. In 2016, 56 percent of Americans said that shrinking the deficit should be a top priority for the next president and Congress.^[1][2]

See what the 2016 candidates and their respective party platforms said about budgets below.

Interested in reading more about the 2016 candidates' stances on issues related to budgets?
Ballotpedia also covered what the candidates said about federal assistance programs, Wall Street and banking policy, and taxes.

Democratic ticket[edit]

Hillary Clinton[edit]

• During the sixth Democratic presidential primary on February 11, 2016, Hillary Clinton talked about addressing problems for low-income, white Americans: “I've come forward with, for example, a plan to revitalize coal country, the coalfield communities that have been so hard hit by the changing economy, by the reduction in the use of coal. You know, coal miners and their families who helped turn on the lights and power our factories for generations are now wondering, has our country forgotten us? Do people not care about all of our sacrifice? And I'm going to do everything I can to address distressed communities, whether they are communities of color, whether they are white communities, whether they are in any part of our country. I particularly appreciate the proposal that Congressman Jim Clyburn has—the 10-20-30 proposal^[3]—to try to spend more federal dollars in communities with persistent generational poverty. And you know what? If you look at the numbers, there are actually as many, if not more white communities that are truly being left behind and left out. So, yes, I do think it would be a terrible oversight not to try to address the very real problems that white Americans -- particularly those without a lot of education whose jobs have -- you know, no longer provided them or even no longer present in their communities, because we have to focus where the real hurt is. And that's why, as president, I will look at communities that need special help and try to deliver that.”^[4]

• At her campaign event “Hard Hats for Hillary” in Boston on November 29, 2015, Clinton announced her plan to invest $275 billion in infrastructure development. The proposal included $250 billion in direct investment by the federal government over the next five years. Another $25 billion would fund a national infrastructure bank, an idea which had struggled to gain traction in Congress. The bank would support $225 billion in loans intended to spur private investment, adding a total of $500 billion in new infrastructure funds into the economy, the Clinton campaign estimated. Her infrastructure proposal would be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes, including ending “preferences for companies that stash their profits in overseas banks to avoid U.S. taxes” and ending “a corporate tax loophole that allows large companies to avoid taxes by moving their headquarters overseas,” according to USA Today. At the event, Clinton said, “Investing infrastructure makes our economy more productive and competitive. To build a strong economy for our future, we must start by building strong infrastructure today.”^{[5] [6]}

• Between 2013 and 2015, Clinton gave several paid speeches to financial institutions in the Unites States and abroad. WikiLeaks released alleged excerpts and transcripts from those speeches in October 2016.^[7]
  • The Clinton campaign declined to verify whether the speeches were authentic.^[8]
  • In 2013, Clinton allegedly said that "big elements" of the Simpson-Bowles framework to reduce the deficit "were right." She continued, "The specifics can be negotiated and argued over. But you got to do all three. You have to restrain spending, you have to have adequate revenues, and you have to have growth. And I think we are smart enough to figure out how to do that."^[7]
  • For more information about the WikiLeaks release, click here.

• Although she voted for a one year moratorium on earmarks in 2008, Hillary Clinton sponsored more than $1.2 billion in earmarks during her tenure in the Senate.^[9][10]

• In 2008, Clinton "called for Congress to pass an economic stimulus package that could cost as much as $110 billion to help low-income families keep their homes, to subsidize heating costs this winter and perhaps refund some taxes," according to the Los Angeles Daily News.^[11]

• Read more of Hillary Clinton's public statements on budgets.

Tim Kaine[edit]

• On his official U.S. Senate site in 2016, Tim Kaine wrote, "As a member of the Budget Committee, I am committed to working with my colleagues to return to a normal budget process and put an end to short-term gimmicks and governing by crisis." He also wrote about his experience as governor of Virginia: "As a Governor who had to keep a budget balanced during the worst recession in a generation and the only Governor in modern times to leave office with a smaller general fund than the one I inherited, I believe my experience is of value on the Budget Committee as Congress wrestles with the fiscal challenges our nation continues to face. Through rigorous debate and compromise, we can put forward a balanced and comprehensive deficit reduction plan that puts our country on a sustainable path and protects the investments that are critical to our future."^[14]

• When Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Keith Hall testified before the Senate Budget Committee following the release of CBO’s 2015 Long-Term Budget Outlook on June 16, 2015, Hall said that he agreed with Sen. Kaine's statement that "reforms to federal benefit programs, coupled with tax reform, are the answer to the country's fiscal challenges."^[15]

• Kaine helped pass two-year budgets in 2013 and 2015 as a member of the Senate Budget Committee.^[16]

• Read more of Tim Kaine's public statements on 2016 campaign issues.

Republican ticket[edit]

Donald Trump[edit]

• Donald Trump accused the Federal Reserve of releasing false numbers to stimulate the economy in 2012. Trump warned against inflation and claimed "the stimulus many people would say is the worst thing that can happen."^[17]

• In 2012, Trump opposed Representative Paul Ryan's budget plan, calling it "catastrophic."^[18]

• In an interview on CNBC, Trump criticized negotiations in Congress to increase the debt ceiling in 2011, saying, "Eventually you have to balance the budget. This is a long way from balancing the budget. This is just a joke. This is a down payment at most."^[19]

• Read more of Donald Trump's public statements on 2016 campaign issues.

Mike Pence[edit]

• Each year The Cato Institute reviews America's governors' fiscal policies. According to The Cato Institute's 2014 Fiscal Policy Report Card, "[Pence] has restrained spending growth. The general fund budget increased an estimated 1.9 percent in 2014, and Pence proposed a 2.8 percent increase for 2015. However, his support for Medicaid expansion under the ACA will increase state spending down the road."^[21]

• Pence voted for H.R.3521 - the Expedited Legislative Line-Item Veto and Rescissions Act of 2012, which proposed authorizing "the President to propose the rescission (line item veto) of all or any dollar amount of funding provided by any enacted bill or joint resolution."^[22]

• Pence voted for S.627 - the Budget Control Act of 2011.^[23]

• In November 2011, Pence voted for H.J.Res.2 - Proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States.^[24]
• Read more of Mike Pence's public statements on 2016 campaign issues.

Green ticket[edit]

Jill Stein[edit]

• In April 2013, Jill Stein criticized President Obama's 2014 budget proposal for cutting into Medicare and Social Security. She added, "The real solution to the recession is to jump start the economy through a massive job creation program like the New Deal that sparked the recovery from the Great Depression." According to Stein, her program "would create 25 million jobs in green energy, sustainable agriculture, public transportation and infrastructure improvements as well as jobs that meet our social needs, including teachers, nurses, day care, affordable housing, drug abuse and violence prevention and rehabilitation. It would be funded by scaling back the oversized military budget to year 2000 levels, adopting a Medicare for All insurance system that would save trillions of dollars, requiring Wall Street gamblers to pay a small (0.5%) sales tax, taxing capitol gains as income, and taxing income more progressively."^[25]

• On her 2012 presidential campaign website, Stein advocated for reducing "the budget deficit by restoring full employment, cutting the bloated military budget, and cutting private health insurance waste."^[26]

Ajamu Baraka[edit]

• On January 7, 2014, Baraka wrote about the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 that was signed into law by President Obama on December 26, 2013, less than three months after the U.S. federal government shutdown because funds had not been appropriated for the next fiscal year. Baraka wrote, "When the details of the deal began to emerge, it became obvious that the agreement was yet another frontal assault on the working class and the poor that has characterized state policies over the last three decades. For the millions of people knocked to their knees by the economic crisis created by the robber barons of finance capital, the neoliberal fiscal priorities of the budget obliterated any hope that they would get relief from the insecurities and fears of living in an economy that seems aligned against them."^[28]
  • In the same 2014 article, Baraka wrote, "The deal does not raise real revenue by closing tax loopholes for wealthy. It does not restore food stamps cuts for the 47 million receiving this assistance or cuts to Medicare and other vital public services like special education programs, Head Start and nearly $2 billion slashed from housing aid. And because the deal lacks mechanisms for raising revenues, it places the burden for funding the deal squarely on the backs of working people by requiring federal workers to take another hit on their wages and benefits. This hit to federal workers is in addition to the increase in taxes that all workers experienced in January 2013 when the payroll tax cut was rescinded while the $4 trillion in Bush tax cuts for the wealthy were allowed to continue for another decade. Furthermore, while poll after poll demonstrated that the public was no longer in favor of costly military adventures around the world and wanted to see a reduction in military expenditures, Congressional representatives still increased military spending by $20 billion."^[28]
• During the government shutdown in October 2013, Baraka wrote about government spending and the influence of the Tea Party. He wrote, "In the current battle over the issues of governmental spending and the debt ceiling in the U.S., there is general bipartisan agreement on the fundamentals, which adhere closely to the elite agenda. The only element gumming up the process toward passing a budget and raising the debt ceiling, thereby ensuring the integrity of the U.S. monetary system, is the reactionary Tea Party faction of the Republican Party. This obstruction to the smooth flow of capital is based on an almost pathological hatred for all things Obama, some of which is overt and some of which (the socially unacceptable components, including white supremacy) is largely subtextual. Yet the Tea Party was born in 2009 in part as a reaction to the excesses of Wall Street and governmental policy, specifically the bank bailout plan that appeared to reward the very same financiers who precipitated the crisis. Tea Party sympathizers, however, allowed this focus to be lost in a sea of their own race-based vitriol of personal attacks and name-calling."^[29]
• Three days after the 2013 U.S. government shutdown began, Baraka wrote, "Because the interests of workers and the poor are not part of the conversation around spending and the debt, it is certain that the day after the U.S. government resolves this latest phony drama, the reality of systematic human rights abuses in the form of racial oppression, capitalist exploitation and colonial national repression will not have been altered in any form."^[29]
• Read more about Ajamu Baraka.

Libertarian ticket[edit]

Gary Johnson[edit]

• The Cato Institute posted the fiscal report cards of Gary Johnson and William Weld when they served as governor of New Mexico (1995-2003) and Massachusetts (1991-1997), respectively. Johnson received a “B” each year from 1996 to 2002, and Weld received an “A” in 1992 and a “B” in 1994 and 1996. According to the Cato Institute, the fiscal report “uses statistical data to grade the governors on their taxing and spending records — governors who have cut taxes and spending the most receive the highest grades, while those who have increased taxes and spending the most receive the lowest grades.”^[30]

• During a Libertarian candidate forum that aired on the Fox Business Network on April 1, 2016, moderator John Stossel asked the candidates about social programs and taking care of the poor. Johnson responded, "I want to support those who are truly in need. I think the biggest issue facing this country right now the fact that government is too big, it spends too much money, it taxes too much. I would be proposing a balanced budget to Congress which would be a 20 percent reduction in federal spending, and to do that, you've got to include Medicaid, Medicare, military spending and to do that you could devolve Medicaid and Medicare to the states."^[31]

• In a February 2012 op-ed for The Washington Times, Gary Johnson said the federal budget should be reduced by 43 percent. He argued that doing so would require "the will and ability to ignore and even fight the special interests that have a vested interest in more and more government spending. Our system is corrupted by special-interest campaign contributions. Crony capitalism permeates our government."^[32]

• Johnson said he supported a balanced budget amendment in an August 2011 interview. He added that "the problem is that passing balanced budgets for future years is what we do and it takes away the immediate problem and kicks it down the road."^[33]
• Read more of Gary Johnson's public statements on 2016 campaign issues.

Bill Weld[edit]

• On September 26, 2016, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld took part in a Facebook Live interview with Reason.com shortly before the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Moderator Matt Welch asked what question they believed would go unanswered during the debate. Weld replied, "The elephant in the room that they're not going to talk about is how they would make the numbers add up. They're not touching the entitlements. They're going to print money like it was water and they somehow think the budget is going to balance itself. No, it's not going to balance itself. If we get in there, we're going to file a balanced budget within the first 100 days."^[35]
• During the Reason.com interview ahead of the first presidential debate between Clinton and Trump, Weld also discussed how he and Johnson balanced their state budgets as governors. Weld said, "When we got in there, our states were flat on their backs. Mr. Dukakis' finance secretary said the year that I took over, 'The state is bankrupt.' He was right. The state could not pay its bills. But you got to do what you got to do. You got to have the political will to make cuts and bring that budget into balance or it hollows out the economy. And every responsible government official knows that. And I'm not sure I see one up there on the stage tonight."^[35]
• Weld said the “first order of business” for a Johnson administration would be to balance the budget. This would happen during the first 100 days or "perhaps less," according to Weld.^[36]
• In a September 14, 2016, interview with MarketWatch, Weld was prompted to make a pitch for what the Libertarian ticket offered. Weld first said that he and Gary Johnson were fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Weld continued, "Point two, we’re both two-term Republican governors who succeeded Democrats in Democratic states and immediately set the fiscal house in order by balancing the budget and cutting spending and cutting taxes. That’s what needs to be done in Washington, DC."^[37]
• MarketWatch asked Weld what the Libertarian ticket's first budget would look like and where he and Gary Johnson would start. Weld replied, "We would go through the exercise of zero-basing the budget, as I did in Massachusetts. I had to meet a 14% budget gap my first month in office and did so without any difficulty, by simply ignoring the sacred cows and limiting myself and the budget to what seemed really necessary expenditures. That would be the exercise. It would not be 10% across the board. It would be a line-by-line analysis. I’ve been around government a long time. I’ve never seen a layer of government that didn’t have 10% or 20% of excess spending in it, and the reason is that legislators love to be loved, they love to get re-elected, and the bigger the appropriations, the more they’re loved and the more they get re-elected."^[37]
• Running for his first term as governor of Massachusetts in 1990, Weld vowed to end “big government,” to cut the state payroll, and to reduce the state's nearly $13 billion budget by $1 billion. “This state government has taken on a life of its own,” Weld said. “[It] has forgotten the simple truth that there’s no such thing as government money; there’s only taxpayers’ money.”^[29]
• In May 1990, Weld stated that each year's budget should start “from scratch. ... You assume no program is necessary ... no bureaucrat's job is necessary ... no line item in the budget is necessary.”^[29]
• During his first year as governor, Weld decreased the state's budget; however, Massachusetts' budget later increased under Weld despite his vow to reduce it by $1 billion. “My hope is that revenues continue to go up,” he told the Boston Herald, “even if that means the budget goes up. If to some extent we’re victims of our own successes, ... that’s not all bad.”^[29]
• Read more about Bill Weld.

Withdrawn candidates[edit]

Recent news[edit]

This section links to a Google news search for the term 2016 + presidential + candidates + budget

See also[edit]

• Presidential candidates, 2016
• Electoral College

Footnotes[edit]

v • e 2016 United States Presidential Election Overviews 2016 presidential election • 2016 presidential candidates • 2016 presidential nominations: calendar and delegate rules • 2016 vice presidential candidates • Possible vice presidential picks Candidate profiles Hillary Clinton Donald Trump Jill Stein Gary Johnson Path to the presidency Republican Convention • Republican Primary Democratic Convention • Democratic Primary Policy positions Abortion • Defunding Planned Parenthood • Agricultural subsidies • Black Lives Matter movement • Budgets • Education • Energy and environmental policy • Federal assistance programs • Federalism • Foreign affairs • LGBTQ rights • Government regulations • Healthcare • Immigration • DACA and DAPA • International trade • Rural policy • Taxes On the campaign trail Ballotpedia's battleground poll • Campaign preparations • Political and leadership attributes • Presidential campaign trackers and opposition researchers Campaign staff Presidential campaign staff transfers, resignations and terminations • Staff leaks from 2016 presidential campaigns Clinton staffers • O'Malley staffers • Sanders staffers Bush staffers • Carson staffers • Christie staffers • Cruz staffers • Fiorina staffers • Huckabee staffers • Kasich staffers • Paul staffers • Rubio staffers • Santorum staffers • Trump staffers Debates PBS, February 11, 2016 (Milwaukee) • PBS, February 4, 2016 (Durham, N.H.) • NBC News, January 17, 2016 (Charleston, S.C.) • ABC, December 19, 2015 (Manchester, N.H.) • CBS, November 14, 2015 (Des Moines) • CNN, October 13, 2015](Las Vegas) February 13, 2016 (Greenville, S.C.) • ABC, February 6, 2016 (Manchester, N.H.) • Fox News, January 28, 2016 (Des Moines) • Fox Business, January 14, 2016 (North Charleston, S.C.) • CNN, December 15, 2015 (Las Vegas) • Fox Business, November 10, 2015 (Milwaukee) • CNBC, October 28, 2015 (Boulder) • CNN, September 16, 2015 (Reagan Library) • Fox News, August 6, 2015 (Cleveland) Analysis The media's coverage of Donald Trump • The media's coverage of Hillary Clinton Post-debate analysis overview Democratic: April 14, 2016 (CNN) • March 9, 2016 (Univision) • March 6, 2016 (CNN) • February 11, 2016 (PBS) • February 4, 2016 (MSNBC) • January 17, 2016 (NBC) • December 19, 2015 (ABC) • November 14, 2015 (CBS) • October 13, 2015 (CNN) Republican: March 10, 2016 (CNN) • March 3, 2016 (FNC) • February 25, 2016 (CNN) • February 13, 2016 (CBS) • February 6, 2016 (ABC) • January 28, 2016 (FNC) • January 14, 2016 (FBN) • December 15, 2015 (CNN) • November 10, 2015 (FBN) • October 28, 2015 (CNBC) • September 16, 2015 (CNN) Insiders Poll: First Democratic debate (October 13, 2015) • Presidential Nominating Index: Clinton remains choice of Democratic Insiders • Presidential Nominating Index: Bush remains choice of Republican Insiders • Insiders Poll: Winners and losers from the Fox News Republican Debate