You don’t have to study federal budget data closely to know that the only way to reduce the huge budget deficits over the next 10 years, while avoiding tax increases, is to cut the growth rate of spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that federal spending in 2023 will come in at a whopping 24.2 percent of GDP, up from an average of 21.0 percent between 1993 and 2022. So a good way to judge various Republican and Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination, if they were governors, is to examine their record on state government spending.
Doing so leads to two interesting conclusions. First, there are important differences among the Republicans who were or are governors. Second, although the old saying is that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats, on spending there sometimes are billions of dollars of difference. In fact, all the Republican governors or former governors performed better than the Democratic governors.
These are the opening two paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “How to Judge Governors Running for President,” Institute for Policy Innovation, TaxBytes, September 27, 2023.
The ranking, measured by average annual growth in state government spending and average annual per capita growth in government spending is, from best to worst:
Mike Pence
Asa Hutchinson
Doug Burghum
Chris Christie
Ron DeSantis
Nikki Haley
Gretchen Whitmer
Gavin Newsom
The data are from my fellow Canuck Chris Edwards, “Governors Running for President,” Cato at Liberty, July 20, 2023.
One thing to note that I didn’t note because of my word constraint: the top 4 are fairly tightly clustered. DeSantis and Haley are outliers.
One positive surprise is Chris Christie. He was governor in a “blue” state and probably had to fight a legislature more than did the 3 governors above him. The biggest negative surprise, to me, at least, was Ron DeSantis. He had a legislature that should have been easy to work with on spending.
UPDATE: See the data by Andrew_FL below. It adds very important context that certainly affected my thinking about the governors.
READER COMMENTS
Andrew_FL
Sep 27 2023 at 6:39pm
How do the absolute levels of spending compare in their states? Modestly increasing a very large amount of spending is arguably worse than a “large” increase of a very modest amount of spending.
David Henderson
Sep 27 2023 at 6:42pm
Good question to which I don’t know the answer.
But I can tell you something about one of the outliers: Gavin Newsom increased spending a huge percent on top of a huge amount of spending. You can probably find more if you check the report that Chris Edwards links to.
Andrew_FL
Sep 27 2023 at 10:09pm
Chris’s table has the absolute total spending levels but given the wide range of state populations these aren’t very comparable. I followed the procedure he said he used for getting population numbers, and I also noticed his table is mislabeled-the spending levels should be millions, not billions!
Here are the per person spending levels at the beginning and ending of each governor’s terms, based on my calculations using Chris’s table:
Hutchinson
$1697.47 $1966.54
Newsom
$3559.72 $5762.80
DeSantis
$1547.64 $1960.58
Pence
$2168.30 $2319.85
Reynolds
$2308.72 $2645.52
Whitmer
$1044.79 $1491.52
Sununu
$1118.93 $1250.34
Christie
$3236.57 $4018.68
Burgum
$3307.54 $3861.00
Haley
$1105.80 $1520.96
I have to say, I did not expect that Michigan would have such low spending levels. But looked at this way, Christie and Burgum look a lot worse. DeSantis looks a lot better, and Haley even moreso.
David Henderson
Sep 27 2023 at 11:28pm
Wow! Thanks, Andrew.
Richard W Fulmer
Sep 28 2023 at 10:00am
Sorted by percent increase:
Pence
6.99
Sununu
11.74
Reynolds
14.59
Hutchinson
15.85
Burgum
16.73
Christie
24.16
DeSantis
26.68
Haley
37.54
Whitmer
42.76
Newsome
61.89
I was surprised that Haley is in nearly up to Whitmer’s level. Pence and Newsome are clearly in leagues of their own.
Dylan
Sep 27 2023 at 8:31pm
Interesting data, but I wonder how much correlation there is between spending as a governor and as president? How did Regan, Clinton, and Bush do in California, Arkansas, and Texas and how does that compare to how they did when they were in the White House? My gut instinct is that there wasn’t a lot of correlation, but I’d welcome anyone who wants to take the time to look up the stats.
Also perhaps a quibble, but conceivably you could increase growth faster than you increase spending to bring budget deficits more in line with historical averages as a % of GDP.
Michael Sandifer
Sep 29 2023 at 5:13am
How is this not all an exercise in futility, given that the non-fascists have seemingly little chance of gaining even double-digit support, while Trump, who signs spending bills thoughtlessly, has huge leads in every national and state poll?
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