FISCAL policy has tumbled from the top of the political agenda with remarkable speed. For most of Barack Obama’s presidency, controlling the national debt, which spiked from 35% of GDP to over 70% after the recession, was a priority for Republicans. Democrats were less worried, but still saw the need for America to fix its long-run challenge: soaring spending on Medicare (public health insurance for the over-65s) and Social Security (public pensions). Mr Obama set up a doomed bipartisan commission with the task of doing just that. Yet in this election, the Republicans have abandoned their fiscal hawkishness. And the long-run barely gets a look-in. That is not all down to Donald Trump. The economic recovery, combined with sharp cuts to spending (triggered by the failure to reach a deficit-reduction deal) have reduced borrowing significantly, from 9.8% of GDP in 2009 to 2.5% in 2015 (in 2016 it will be a little higher). Republicans in Congress—which, unlike the president, actually writes the budget—have also had a change of heart. Their economic priority is now to boost growth by cutting taxes and red-tape, which they blame for the slow recovery from the financial crisis. Faster growth, they say, would lead to healthier public finances.

Mr Trump has assumed that cause with gusto. He promises to raise economic growth to 3.5% or even 4%, up from an average of 2.1% since the end of the recession. But he also pledges extra spending, on infrastructure, veterans, education, child care and so on, as well as defence, a more usual GOP priority. Mr Trump is imprecise about numbers. But his expansion of the military would alone cost $450 billion over a decade, says the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a fiscally hawkish think-tank. (For comparison, today’s total national debt is about $14 trillion, or 77% of GDP.)

Big spending on top of tax cuts has transformed an unrealistic agenda into a fantasy. Start with the growth predictions. America is growing slowly in part because baby-boomers are retiring. The population aged 25-54 will grow by just 0.3% a year until 2024, compared with 0.9% between 1994 and 2004. Mr Trump promises to create 25m new jobs, presumably over two terms—20m more than is forecast today. It is not clear who would fill these vacancies. Restoring the labour-force participation of prime-age workers to its record high would unearth only 4.3m new workers. To achieve rapid growth Mr Trump would instead need productivity growth to average 2.6%, says the CRFB, a level not reached in any ten-year period in modern history.

Even conservative economists see this. Growth of only 2.8% would call for a “gold medal”; reaching just 3% would put Mr Trump in the “hall of fame”, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who ran the Congressional Budget Office for two years under George W. Bush. The Tax Foundation, a non-partisan think-tank, reckons tax cuts can significantly boost growth, but still says that Mr Trump’s tax plan would cost $2.6 trillion-3.9 trillion over a decade.

Mr Trump promises to free up funds by lopping 1% a year off the roughly one-third of the budget that is left after defence, Social Security and Medicare. This adds up to a 29% real-terms cut over a decade to budgets that have already been slashed since 2011. Even assuming he manages this, and that there is no new infrastructure spending, the CRFB reckons Mr Trump would send the national debt soaring to 105% of GDP by 2026 (see chart). And this is before accounting for growth, which, in spite of Mr Trump’s tax and regulatory policies, would probably fall as a result of his immigration crackdown and trade barriers. Mr Trump has launched his tax plans three times, yet they remain vague. At first, he promised to tax income from small firms, which are usually treated like any other earnings, at a maximum rate of 15%. After many analysts noted that this might cause high-earners to masquerade as small-businesses, the policy disappeared. It had been dropped, the campaign told the Tax Foundation, before promising the small-business lobby that it remains. Finally, the plan is steeply regressive. The incomes of the poorest rise by 1-8% (depending on growth effects, and on small-business taxes). But thanks to a whacking cut to the top rate of tax, from 39.6% to 33%, the incomes of the top 1% of earners would surge by 10-20%. Yet Mr Trump claims, inexplicably, that a couple earning $5m a year would see a tax cut of just 3%. Compared with such a shambles, it is obvious that Hillary Clinton’s policies are much more serious. But that is not the same as saying they are desirable.

Mrs Clinton, whose pledges are precise enough to be quantified, wants new spending totalling about $1.7 trillion over a decade. Her best ideas concern infrastructure, on which she would spend an extra $250 billion. A further $25 billion would capitalise a federal infrastructure bank. This would lend $250 billion to projects that can make a return, such as toll bridges. (Mr Obama has tried to set up such a bank; 32 states already have their own.)

Many other programmes make up the other spending. Having been pushed leftward on the issue by Bernie Sanders, Mrs Clinton would guarantee that by 2021 households earning less than $125,000 pay no tuition fees at public universities in their states. She would cap child-care costs at 10% of income, fund paid parental leave and create tax-credits to encourage firms to share their profits with workers, hire apprentices and invest in manufacturing.

Mrs Clinton promises to pay for all this with a combination of higher taxes on the rich—for example, an additional 4% tax on incomes over $5 million. She has also proposed various new taxes on business, such as a fee on big banks. Her plan very nearly funds itself, according to the CRFB.

The Clinton agenda, though, is too complicated. America’s clunky tax and welfare system needs simplification, not endless new deductions, credits and phase-outs. American businesses take 175 hours per year to comply with all taxes, compared with 110 hours in Britain. Complexity is hardly unique to Mrs Clinton’s policies: it is a product of America’s incrementalism and lobbying. But it is still unwelcome.

To the extent that the candidates do talk about America’s longer-term fiscal woes, Mrs Clinton is the more credible. For instance, she promises to expand the Affordable Care Act’s fledgling cost-saving experiments in Medicare. Yet because the trust fund for Medicare runs dry only in 2028, and the Social Security fund only in 2034, this issue will only really grab politicians—and electorates—later. Mr Trump is not interested; Mrs Clinton, for once, not scrutinised. America would be best-served by a rigorous contest of economic ideas. It is not getting that.