#NeverGaryJohnson

When Johnson took the tiller in New Mexico in 1995, the budget stood at $4.397 billion. When he left in 2003, it had grown to $7.721, an increase of 7.29 percent a year. Of the eleven governors who filed to run for president this year (two Democrats, Johnson, and eight Republicans), only one had a worse record on spending growth. In New Mexico, Bill Richardson, Johnson’s Democratic successor, clocked in a little better than he did, but Richardson’s successor, Susana Martinez, has shown what a fiscal conservative looks like: New Mexico currently spends less than it did when she took office. It’s not just at a state level that being more fiscally conservative than Johnson is a bipartisan achievement. Federal spending during the time Johnson was in office grew at an average annual rate of 4.49 percent. Late Clinton and early Bush weren’t as successful in their efforts to fight spending cuts as they might have been, but Johnson makes them look like Coolidge, and federal spending since then has grown at an average annual rate of 4.56 percent.

Johnson also claims to have balanced the budget every year, but what he means by this is that he complied with the New Mexico constitution, which as a practical matter prohibits operational spending deficits. New Mexico’s debt is required to be off the books, or at least off those books, in a separate “capital outlay” budget. This means that of course his operating budgets were balanced; New Mexico makes the alternative impossible. The capital outlays are considered “balanced” if it is believed that they can likely be paid for in the future, and rosy assumptions are permitted. It’s as if you or I claimed to be debt-free because our current account, which does not allow for overdrafts, had no overdrafts, despite our taking out ever more maxed-out credit cards and making minimum payments on each. In the sense that Johnson says he balanced the budgets, every president and Congress in history has passed balanced federal budgets 100 percent of the time. In fact, Johnson inherited a debt of $1.8 billion and left a debt of $4.6 billion, a rate of increase unmatched by the 22 governors in either party who have filed for presidential primaries in the past two decades, with the exception of Governor Tom Vilsack (D., Iowa) in 2007. During every year that Johnson, as he says, balanced the budget, he added to the debt.

As with so many big-government types, government growth under his administration was greater not only quantitatively but qualitatively. That is, he expanded government into new and illegitimate areas. Most notably, he created a new form of the refundable tax credit, a film subsidy that has since spread like a cancer across America. Plenty of other governors imitated Johnson’s pattern of buying publicity, including photo opportunities with celebrities, by paying, cash down, for filmmakers to move out of some other state; traditional subsidies just weren’t generous enough to enable states to compete.