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Beware Of Biden History Regarding Deficit Spending
Surely he will have a change of heart and leave his austerity thoughts in a trash can. Austerity pulls money from the economy which is simply reckless indeed. Voters cannot become complacent.
Joe Biden has always been a deficit hawk, including on Social Security.
It’s exceedingly unlikely that a Democratic Congress would ever try to slash Social Security or Medicare. One important question, however, is what will happen if President Biden comes face-to-face with a Republican Congress—or even just a GOP-held House or Senate—that tries to force his hand on spending cuts.
(Mitch McConnell has essentially said he will wait until a Democrat is in office to try to slash entitlements, because it’s too unpopular for the GOP to do on its own.)
We know what transpired during the Obama administration: The White House tried to compromise. It agreed that the deficit was a clear and present danger—despite the fact that the economy was still depressed after the recession—and attempted to negotiate a grand bargain of spending cuts and tax increases.
Biden himself led discussions with a bipartisan group on behalf of the administration, and appeared ready to give up trillions in budget reductions, though they wouldn’t have targeted the major entitlements. As late as 2014, Obama caved to Republican requests and included a proposal to slow down the growth of Social Security benefits in his annual budget (he later dropped the idea in the face of liberal pushback).
Would a Biden administration travel down the same road, and try to compromise? Compromise, after all, is what Biden is running on.
Ideally, a Democratic president in 2021 would not only oppose budget cuts today, but would jettison most of Washington’s obsession with so-called fiscal discipline. The national debt is, truly, among the least of our problems right now. We may need to fully pay for ongoing expenses like a healthcare expansion. But there are plenty of urgent priorities with big, one-time price tags—infrastructure, a transition to green energy—that could be deficit financed without causing any significant economic issues. Certainly, the rock bottom interest rates on U.S. treasury debt suggest we have plenty of room to borrow.
It unfortunately might be too much to ask for that kind of leader. But at the very least, the next person in the Oval Office should be able to stand up to the debt scolds on the big issues, like entitlements or austerity. If they can’t, the sick and elderly will suffer, the economy will suffer, and their presidency will suffer.
One tragedy of the Obama administration was how, following the failure of the grand bargain, the GOP still steamrolled it into passing major spending cuts that helped turn the economic recovery into a crawl, and may well have contributed to a Trump win in the end.
Perhaps Biden learned a lesson from that experience, and would resist repeating it. But our ex-VP has talked extensively about his desire to return to an era of bipartisan cooperation. And whether we’re talking about Social Security or another major program, the budget is one area in which those instincts are truly scary.
Surely he will have a change of heart and leave his austerity thoughts in a trash can. Austerity pulls money from the economy which is simply reckless indeed. Voters cannot become complacent.
Joe Biden has always been a deficit hawk, including on Social Security.
It’s exceedingly unlikely that a Democratic Congress would ever try to slash Social Security or Medicare. One important question, however, is what will happen if President Biden comes face-to-face with a Republican Congress—or even just a GOP-held House or Senate—that tries to force his hand on spending cuts.
(Mitch McConnell has essentially said he will wait until a Democrat is in office to try to slash entitlements, because it’s too unpopular for the GOP to do on its own.)
We know what transpired during the Obama administration: The White House tried to compromise. It agreed that the deficit was a clear and present danger—despite the fact that the economy was still depressed after the recession—and attempted to negotiate a grand bargain of spending cuts and tax increases.
Biden himself led discussions with a bipartisan group on behalf of the administration, and appeared ready to give up trillions in budget reductions, though they wouldn’t have targeted the major entitlements. As late as 2014, Obama caved to Republican requests and included a proposal to slow down the growth of Social Security benefits in his annual budget (he later dropped the idea in the face of liberal pushback).
Would a Biden administration travel down the same road, and try to compromise? Compromise, after all, is what Biden is running on.
Ideally, a Democratic president in 2021 would not only oppose budget cuts today, but would jettison most of Washington’s obsession with so-called fiscal discipline. The national debt is, truly, among the least of our problems right now. We may need to fully pay for ongoing expenses like a healthcare expansion. But there are plenty of urgent priorities with big, one-time price tags—infrastructure, a transition to green energy—that could be deficit financed without causing any significant economic issues. Certainly, the rock bottom interest rates on U.S. treasury debt suggest we have plenty of room to borrow.
It unfortunately might be too much to ask for that kind of leader. But at the very least, the next person in the Oval Office should be able to stand up to the debt scolds on the big issues, like entitlements or austerity. If they can’t, the sick and elderly will suffer, the economy will suffer, and their presidency will suffer.
One tragedy of the Obama administration was how, following the failure of the grand bargain, the GOP still steamrolled it into passing major spending cuts that helped turn the economic recovery into a crawl, and may well have contributed to a Trump win in the end.
Perhaps Biden learned a lesson from that experience, and would resist repeating it. But our ex-VP has talked extensively about his desire to return to an era of bipartisan cooperation. And whether we’re talking about Social Security or another major program, the budget is one area in which those instincts are truly scary.
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