Will John Kerry bring fiscal discipline?

No, but a Republican Congress might:

My AEI colleague Eric Engen and I [Kevin Hassett] just completed a detailed analysis of the Kerry spending proposals. To perform the analysis, we combed through Kerry’s web site and public statements to assemble a list of every spending promise he has made, and then dug through the public record to find third-party cost estimates for each of his proposals. When necessary, we adjusted the period for the existing score to the 10-year budget window using standard techniques. When we could not find such cost estimates, we relied on numbers that were supplied by the Kerry campaign. When the Kerry campaign did not provide cost estimates, we set the score for that promise to zero.

Even with that generous accounting, the Kerry spending promises add up to an extraordinary amount of money. Our best estimate is that Kerry’s proposals will add up to between $2 trillion and $2.1 trillion over the next ten years. Since the revenue from his tax proposals relative to the current baseline is actually negative, this implies that the Kerry proposal would increase the deficit by perhaps as much as $2.5 trillion over the next ten years.

On August 3, 2004, the Kerry campaign responded to criticisms such as this with a revised budget plan. The main difference between the first and second plans is that the campaign now claims to be able to save about $300 billion from eliminating corporate welfare. Even if we include this rather implausible savings in our estimate, the net increase in the deficit associated with Kerry’s proposals is on the order of $2.2 trillion.

What would he spend the money on? According to our analysis, roughly half of this additional spending is attributable to Senator Kerry’s health care proposals that would add more than $900 billion in federal outlays. Education expenditure accounts for nearly one quarter of Kerry’s new spending, with almost $500 billion added over ten years. A $400 billion expansion of military personnel and benefits for veterans comprises most of the remainder of Kerry’s spending plans, with the balance distributed among numerous social programs and increases in international aid.

I have not been through these numbers, but Kerry has not exactly been running on a platform of spending cuts. Most of all, I’d like to see a further analysis, weighting each number by the probability it will pass into law.

Thanks to TCS for the link.

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