30 Issues | Clinton vs. Trump on the National Debt

The Brian Lehrer Show | Aug 3, 2016

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, discusses the effects that Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's proposed policies are likely to have on the national debt – in the short and long term.

Moody's analysis of Hillary Clinton's proposals evaluated three key economic policies: tax and spending policy, immigration policy and proposals on minimum wage. Since Clinton intends to pay for her spending proposal by raising taxes on high income households, Zandi said it’s not a big plus or negative for the economy.

Comparatively, Trump’s tax-spending policy proposal will run a very large deficit.

"Over 10 year period it adds 9.5 trillion dollars to national debt," said Zandi, attributing it to a lack of comparable spending cuts to tax cuts.

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