Very concerned. And not a little constipated.

Among the many things Mike Pence lied about in the Veep debate -- apart from his lies denying all the things Donald Trump has lied about -- would be the effects of the Trump economic plan (whatever it is this week) and the Clinton policy, especially his repeated claims that Hillary Clinton would explode the national debt. So hey, stipulating first off that an unhealthy obsession with the debt is, from the get-go, right-wing driven bullshit that's mostly used as an excuse to gut social spending (while military spending is always good for the economy), let's just take a quick look-see at how utterly Mike Pence is lying, shall we?

Trump's debt over 10 years is 26.5 times bigger than Hillary Clinton's, huh!

So how would the Trump and Clinton economic plans actually affect the debt (again, noting that fretting about national debt is a bullshit rightwing preoccupation to begin with)? We'll even give Pence a great big advantage here by using estimates from the rightwing (but "nonpartisan") Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a budget-hawk group that's the brainchild of former Nixon dude and billionaire Peter Peterson, and has explicitly pushed for slashing Medicare and Social Security. The group is also notorious for having been a front for Big Tobacco money back in the 1990s, when it happily fought excise taxes on tobacco products. So if any group is likely to hate the nasty tax-n-spend liberals, it's the CRFB, right?

Here's their take on the Trump and Clinton economic plans:

Incorporating rough and preliminary estimates of these new policies, we find that Clinton’s plans would increase the debt by $200 billion over a decade above current law levels (compared to our prior estimate of $250 billion), and Trump’s plans would increase the debt by $5.3 trillion (compared to our prior estimate of $11.5 trillion). As a result, debt would rise to above 86 percent of GDP under Clinton and 105 percent under Trump.

Again, that's the estimate from a crowd that's obsessed with debt. They ain't crazy about Clinton's plan, because it leaves wasteful fripperies like Social Security and Medicare and the social safety net in place. But they really hate Trump's plan, which would slash revenues while imagining economic growth would pay for the losses. If the CRFB isn't buying it, that's probably a pretty good indication that Pence is full of it.

A Washington Post op-ed, also using estimates from the CRFB, made a similar point:

Here’s the bottom line for the nation’s bottom line: Clinton’s spending increases and other proposals that cost money have a total price tag of about $1.8 trillion over the next decade. But her offsets, which come mostly from tax hikes, would save an estimated $1.9 trillion over that same period (or closer to $1.6 trillion if you don’t count those as-yet-unspecified business tax proposals).

The net fiscal impact of her plans, then, is pretty close to zero.

Huh. And all of this is before you get to the stuff that really matters, like the fact that Trump's tax plan would be a huge gift to the already wealthy, while Clinton would provide relief to middle-class taxpayers and increase taxes considerably not merely on the top 1 percent of taxpayers, but on the richest earners within the 1 percent. Plus there's the minor detail that Trump's plan, if enacted (highly likely with a Paul Ryan Congress) could plunge us into a new economic crash.

Turns out that Hillary Clinton isn't only the liberal in this election, she's also the relative fiscal conservative. Not that we're going to go slapping that on a bumper sticker.

That is some chutzpah! Is that some chutzpah?

Yes, that is some chutzpah. But in addition to being the real insulter and the real racist and also the real killer, Hillary Clinton is also the real debt exploder. You can't argue with those facts! No, really you can't argue with them. Because they're not even wrong.

[WaPo debate transcript / Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget / Sourcewatch / ABC News / WaPo / Vox]