I’ve been following Tom Campbell since the late 1990s, when he joined Ron Paul in criticizing the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo, and he’s always struck me as a deeply interesting figure. Yousefzadeh of The New Ledger has just published an interview with the newly-minted U.S. Senate candidate, and it’s worth reading. Much of the discussion centers on Campbell’s views on Israel, which David Frum addresses at length in this post.

Here’s what I found interesting, and disappointing.

My proposal for dealing with the deficit is set out in an alternative to the President’s budget. It’s on my website, at campbell.org. I cut the President’s deficit more than half: by almost 700 billion dollars.

After perusing the plan, it occurred to me that it was far more ambitious in some respects than the Ryan Roadmap, and not in an entirely good way. Granted, this is an outline of a vision for the budget, and Campbell deserves some credit for being more specific than most Senate candidates, though that isn’t saying very much.

And:

PY: Do you support any kind of a tax increase on the federal level, either via income taxes, corporate taxes, or the implementation of a VAT? TC: I do not. I believe the federal government has spent far too much. The growth of the federal government is unsustainable, increasing taxes will only continue that growth.

As Keith Hennessey has argued, it makes more sense to talk about spending discipline rather than fiscal discipline, in large part because it is it is spending and not deficits that creates costs and benefits, and spending will, generally speaking, have to be funded by taxes or benefit cuts, now or at some point in the future. Robert Barro made this case very well.

So naturally I’m sympathetic to Campbell’s position. But I think it rests on unrealistic expectations of spending cuts in the short- to medium-term. Campbell was critical of the 2001 Bush tax cut than Senator Dianne Feinstein backed (Campbell is hoping to run against Senator Barbara Boxer, but this is an interesting historical factoid for Californians). There were many good reasons to question its wisdom: for one thing, it was a temporary measure passed through budget reconciliation that introduced new distortions into the tax code. Does Campbell consider the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — the planned expiration — to be a tax increase? I assume he does. Given that spending won’t decrease according to his plan, how does he intend to address the debt problem? As Ramesh argues, it doesn’t sense for conservatives to negotiate with themselves on policies like a VAT. Like it or not, though, it’s an idea that the right has to take seriously.

Tax increases are bad. Tax gimmicks are worse. Overspending is worse. I disagree with Bruce Bartlett on many things, but his measured praise of the incremental Wyden-Gregg tax proposal strikes me as convincing.