Mike Pence’s Sensible (and Probably Doomed) Plan to Fix the National Debt

Former Vice President Mike Pence is leading a new effort to convince federal lawmakers to tackle the spiraling national debt.

The U.S. debt crossed the $35 trillion threshold in late July, less than eight months after hitting $34 trillion. The upward trend shows no sign of stopping: The Congressional Budget Office projects that the debt will reach $56 trillion by 2034, when it will represent 122% of the size of the U.S. economy.

As the country heads into uncharted and dangerous territory, Pence’s recently launched nonprofit, Advancing American Freedom (AAF), is urging lawmakers to return to calmer fiscal waters.

“After decades of ignoring the magnitude of excessive federal spending, the consequences are finally starting to catch up with us,” the association says in an eight-page document that lays out some basic strategies for controlling the debt. “America faces a bleak future as interest payments crowd out spending on core government functions, our economy stagnates under an unsustainable burden, and we are strategically disadvantaged internationally.”

To get debt under control, the AAF stresses that lawmakers cannot simply focus on the discretionary portion of the federal budget, which accounts for less than 30 percent of all federal spending. At the same time, “mandatory spending” accounts for more than 60 percent (the rest is interest payments on the debt).

The bulk of mandatory spending is Social Security and Medicare, but several other programs also operate on autopilot, including food stamps, federal worker retirement benefits, Obamacare health insurance subsidies, and veterans benefits.

“Mandatory spending is the primary driver of the national debt because there are no restrictions on the uncontrolled growth of these programs,” the AAF debt report argues.

Among the proposals to rein in mandatory spending, the group calls for means-testing future Social Security cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for people earning more than $1 million a year, ending President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans, ending Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for wealthy Americans and forming a congressional commission to propose spending cuts.

The group also calls for an end to so-called “tax expenditures,” which are forms of spending hidden in the tax code, such as corporate subsidies for green energy given in the form of renewable energy tax credits.

The new document picks up where Pence left off during his failed Republican primary campaign last year. During the campaign, Pence stressed the importance of sound fiscal policy and excoriated his former boss, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, for ignoring the threat posed by out-of-control borrowing and unsustainable entitlement programs.

Of course, Pence’s campaign never really got off the ground. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had a bit more success, but it’s clear that there aren’t many voices talking seriously about the debt.

It is nevertheless important to try. In an essay published by Reason Last year, Pence urged conservatives to “resist the temptation to prioritize what is popular over what is wise.” In that case, he was criticizing the current trend among leading Republicans to abandon free-market principles and embrace the politics of will-to-power as the solution to America’s problems. But he might as well have been talking about the debt. Much of that $35 trillion in borrowing has come about because leaders have prioritized what is popular (government spending) over what is wise (spending only what you are willing to raise in taxes).

Of course, Pence is not entirely blameless in this area. He appears to have had little influence in the Trump administration. Nevertheless, he was a major figure in a presidential administration that added more than $8 trillion to the debt in just four years—a record Biden is now striving to match. A member of the House of Representatives for a dozen years starting in 2001, Pence arrived in Washington when the federal budget was nearly balanced. He supported two costly foreign wars (though he opposed a costly Medicare expansion during the George W. Bush administration).

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as meaningless—after all, Pence is a pariah within his own party and likely has even less influence with Democrats. He holds no elected office, and there’s no reason to believe that will change anytime soon.

But none of the people who to have The political establishment seems willing to engage on the national debt issue, at least not publicly or officially. Pence has nothing to lose, and that means he is free to say things that others won’t. I hope he keeps talking.