Tonight the candidates won't talk about social issues or foreign policy but the one issue that matters most to voters: the economy

Reuters

Early in the campaign, most Republican presidential candidates hit two notes - and two notes only - when talking about the economy: Cut spending, reduce taxes. Now, they're getting more nuanced, but we still have a lot of questions we'd like to ask them, both to help define their differences from one another, and to push them to explain the reasoning behind their stated positions.



Sadly, we're not sponsoring the GOP's economy-themed debate on Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. EDT, at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. - our pals at Bloomberg Television and The Washington Post are, with WBIN-TV. But we're happy to suggest some queries for the moderators of the two-hour roundtable, starting with these five topics.

1. All of you here on this stage have said, for the last year, that cutting government spending will turn the economy around and unleash job creation. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, in the last six months, Congress has passed bills to cut more than $1 trillion from the federal budget - or more than $2 trillion, if you count cuts mandated by the debt-ceiling deal in August. Yet unemployment is actually one-tenth of a point higher today than it was in January. How much more federal spending must we cut to reduce unemployment dramatically? Please be specific.