- March 14, 2025
Craig Miller
AGE: 62
FAMILY: Married, three children, two grandchildren
QUIRKY FACT: Harley-Davidson rider; had a bike since age 17
BIO: Miller started washing dishes at age 14. He served in Vietnam. He has lived the American Dream by working his way up from humble beginnings to being the CEO of both Pizzeria Uno and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, creating more than 40,000 jobs in his career. Herman Cain endorsed his candidacy, simply saying, “He gets it.”
What would you do to balance the budget?
Fixed expenditures so far exceed the revenue streams. … A lot of it centers around entitlement programs. So the long-term fix for it has to be reduction in spending, and it has to include entitlement programs and other fixed programs that are literally spinning out of control from the standpoint of the amount of the GDP that is spent on those programs. The other leg of that is revenue, and the best and only way we should be getting revenue today is by getting the economy growing again. …
Would you be willing to pledge not to raise taxes?
So I would pledge not to raise taxes, but I would also say that raising revenue is something we have to do. And the best way to do that is to create the right environment where business people are willing to make investments and grow our economy. We need to be much smarter in terms of how we use other resources that we have, because the country has enormous resources. Not just human resources from its people, but it has energy resources that it has not been willing to tap into progressively.
If you’re asked to raise the national debt ceiling, how would you vote? What would you propose to decrease the national debt?
Raising the debt ceiling is something that ought not to be done on a routine basis. The only time that I would be willing to say that I would do that would be in times of dire national security: some sort of conflict where our country would need additional financial resources. Other than that, I would not agree to raise the debt ceiling. I’m in favor of a balanced budget amendment. I think our country needs to have the fiscal discipline put on its government to make sure we don’t continue to spin this totally out of control, we can’t end up where we find Europe ending up today. So if our federal elected officials are not willing to do their job, and that is to create a balanced budget, then I think the American people need to demand that they create a balanced budget amendment.
The second part of your question: You have to start by balancing the budget currently, and it will take surpluses to reduce the deficit we have in place. The biggest culprit is the promises that have been made to the American people by its government. ... The biggest ones are centered around entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and to a certain extent Social Security when you go out into future years. So my proposal is we absolutely have to modernize those programs, and we have to make them acceptable for the future generations.
What should be done with the federal tax code? Where do you stand on the subject of a flat tax?
I am a proponent of the fair tax, and I am a supporter of the fair tax. That’s a little bit strange coming from a business person, but Herman Cain and I have been friends for a long time, and we both feel very strongly that we need to revise our tax code, and the current way we collect taxes is not only unfair, it doesn’t do the job that it needs to do. …
My preferred way is the consumption-based tax, or the fair tax. The current tax code and the burden it puts on people, and the way it tries to manage the free enterprise system by influencing the actions of taxpayers is something I think our country can no longer have as its primary revenue source for funding our federal government. So I’m a fair tax supporter. … And the quicker we can move to something other than our current tax code, the better off our country will be.
What are you going to do to reform Medicaid and Medicare?
That is an extraordinarily difficult question because those are promises that have been made to people and the cost associated with it that is now being mandated down to the states is something the states are having an enormous amount of difficulty dealing with.
I think a voucher system has to be, at the end of the day, the best way to approach that from a federal government standpoint. I’d like the decision-making process and the ability to take care of its citizens to rest more with the states than it does with the federal government. When the federal government gets involved in these big entitlement programs, the waste, abuse, and the way they’re dealt with, eliminate the free enterprise system — they eliminate the competitive system, and they don’t give the states the latitude to manage that process. I think it would be much better managed if there was some kind of voucher system making the states responsible for taking care of those programs. … Every state has to operate on a balanced budget, so states are used to doing that, and the federal government is not used to doing it, and consequently we have programs like Medicare and Medicaid that are broke and trillions and trillions of dollars in commitments that have been made with no earthly way to pay for it.
