Federal spending the core issue in GOP Senate runoff

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Both Jack Kingston and David Perdue tell voters they are fiscal hawks intent on taming the federal budget deficit.

But their sincerity and track records on the budget have been sharply debated and form the central issue of the July 22 Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate.

It’s fitting, given that Kingston has devoted his 22-year U.S. House career to the money-disbursing Appropriations Committee, while Perdue has tangled with corporate balance sheets as an executive and says the soaring debt motivated him to run for office for the first time.

Kingston boasts that he has done the nitty-gritty of cutting budgets in Congress in recent years, but he also voted for increased spending when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House in the mid-2000s.

Perdue says he wants to balance the budget through economic growth without tax increases, but Kingston says the the newcomer can’t be trusted because he is not a veteran of budget battles and Perdue’s comments don’t always hew to conservative orthodoxy.

The winner of the Republican runoff moves on to face Democrat Michelle Nunn and Libertarian Amanda Swafford in the general election.

Over his career as a U.S. representative, Kingston has risen to become a “cardinal” as the House member overseeing one piece of the federal budget. He now presides over what is routinely the most controversial of the 12 annual spending bills, covering the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services.

Before that, Kingston was responsible for the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. There, Kingston boasts, he crafted bills that cut real spending via compromise with Democrats.

But Perdue says Kingston has only recently found religion when it comes to spending cuts. The GOP had one-party control from 2003 to 2007 and ran a budget deficit each year. The biggest change to fast-growing entitlement programs was to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

Kingston counters that he was a burr in the side of GOP leaders on cost overruns at the Congressional Visitors Center, and he was one of the first appropriators to say publicly that congressionally directed “earmark” spending should go.

But Kingston availed himself of many earmarks as the go-to House Republican to bring money back home to Georgia, leaving him vulnerable to attack.

Perdue does not have a legislative record, meaning he must draw on his business background and his public statements — which sometimes cross electric fences Perdue says he does not know exist as a political novice.

In an interview with The Macon Telegraph, Perdue compared his corporate background to the federal budget: “I was never able to turn around a company just by cutting spending. You had to figure out a way to get revenue growing.”

The Kingston campaign has used the comment to blare in advertisements that Perdue wants a tax increase. Perdue says he meant that revenue must increase through economic growth. He bristles at the Kingston characterization.

“This idea that people want to say that I want a tax increase is really egregious,” Perdue said.

He pointed to a Kingston quote that could be interpreted the same way. In 2011, Kingston told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he would consider some tax revenue increases as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling: "If it's a tax loophole that helps one industry to the detriment of others, I think we'd certainly want to close it," Kingston said then.

Kingston now flatly says: “I do not believe we have a tax problem. I believe we have a spending problem.”

Both say they want to get rid of the income tax in favor of a national 23 percent sales tax, known as the Fair Tax. Perdue has indicated he would like states and municipalities to be able to collect taxes for out-of-state Internet retailers, but he says that goal is merely consistent with the Fair Tax. Perdue does not support the pending Internet retail tax in Congress, the Marketplace Fairness Act, because it only nibbles around the margins and does not offer a “holistic” tax code rewrite.

Moving forward, Kingston says much needless spending could be cut by eliminating “duplication” in the federal government, and he rattles off what he views as wasteful spending. There’s 47 different federal job-training programs, he said, 45 early childhood intervention programs, and a loophole that allows illegal immigrants to claim the child tax credit.

Perdue sounds a similar note, pointing to a Government Accountability Office study that found billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on duplicative programs. He said the solution is a "zero-based budgeting approach," where each federal agency must make its case to Congress each year from scratch.

Kingston has supported the same idea for years.

The issues

Immigration

• What they say: Both Kingston and Perdue say they oppose "amnesty" and support more action to secure the U.S. border with Mexico before any new laws are passed.
• What they've done: Kingston has voted for border security measures, including a 2006 bill, but not any bill that would offer legalization — including a "no" on the failed DREAM Act for young immigrants. Perdue serves on the Georgia Tech Foundation Board, which he said gives him insight into the plight of high-skilled immigrants and makes him want to change the H1B visa system as a separate issue.
• What's the spin: Kingston's campaign points out that a subsidiary of the National Retail Federation supported allowing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants when Perdue served on the NRF board. Perdue's campaign notes that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — which has spent millions boosting Kingston — is a supporter of immigration legislation that includes a path to citizenship. Both have been resolute in their opposition.

Common Core

• What they say: Kingston has condemned Common Core education standards by comparing them to Obamacare — the scarlet letter for Republicans. Perdue says the idea was good in theory but now should be scrapped because the federal government tried to coerce the country into it.
• What they've done: Kingston introduced a bill last year to block the Department of Education from spending any money on multistate education standards. The bill has not yet received a hearing. Perdue's position is made more difficult by the fact that his cousin, former Gov. Sonny Perdue, helped start Common Core.
• What's the spin: Kingston and his allies have attacked Perdue on the issue, including an ad declaring that Perdue "has no problem with Obama's Common Core standards" and a mailer depicting Perdue with the president in matching graduation regalia. Perdue says this is not true: He wants to abandon Common Core and have states and school boards take the lead on standards.

Health care

• What they say: Both candidates vow to repeal and replace Obamacare, saying it leads to higher taxes and less choice for consumers.
• What they've done: Kingston has voted dozens of times to block or defang the health care overhaul, though he's also said letting it "fall to pieces on its own" isn't necessarily responsible. Perdue wants to replace it with a bill by U.S. Rep. Tom Price of Roswell, which expands coverage through tax credits, allows the sale of insurance across state lines and overhauls the medical malpractice system, among other things.
• What's the spin: Kingston faced attacks for saying conservatives should fix Obamacare. He quickly backed off that rhetoric. Kingston bashes Perdue for saying in 2005 that there should be a "national solution" for health care. Perdue says he meant Republicans should have proposed a conservative solution while they were in power — and by not doing so they allowed the climate for Obamacare to happen.

Foreign policy