President Joe Biden is going on offense over Social Security, even as he offers few details on how he plans to defend the program’s long-term financial integrity.
Biden renewed attacks on the GOP over the popular entitlement program during last week’s State of the Union address, saying Republicans “want to put Social Security on the chopping block.”
“If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age, I will stop you,” Biden said. “The working people who built this country pay more into Social Security than millionaires and billionaires do. It’s not fair.”
Yet the president’s fiscal 2025 budget released on Monday does not offer many concrete details on how he will shore up the program’s finances for the long run.
Biden’s entitlement two-step has upset budget hawks, who argue that both political parties need to get serious about saving the program rather than trying to prove who can vow to protect it the loudest.
“Not helpful is the president’s refusal to touch Social Security, the largest government program,” Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget President Maya MacGuineas said about Biden’s proposal. “That’s like asking a doctor to perform a surgery with one hand tied behind his back.”
Both major political parties are ducking “hard choices,” MacGuineas added, and risk harming both future and current retirees as a result.
“We are entering an inflection point in our nation’s fiscal history,” she said. “Time is of the essence to get our situation under control. Both the economy and our national security depend on it.”
Social Security’s trust fund is on course to run out of funding in 2033, at which point it would face a 23% across-the-board benefit cut if no action is taken.
“The solutions available to us get more and more disruptive and politically unpalatable the longer we wait, and we have already put off addressing this problem for decades, leaving lawmakers with limited options,” said Emerson Sprick, an economist with the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Unfortunately, neither President Biden nor former President Trump is providing the strong and pragmatic leadership to reform Social Security that the country and the program need.”
Former President and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump rejects Biden’s accusations that he wants to cut Social Security and says a second Biden term would weaken the program “because the country is weak.”
The issue flared up again Monday when Trump said, “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.”
Team Biden took those words to mean Biden would cut Social Security, while Team Trump said he was only talking about wasteful management spending.
Biden’s 2025 budget proposal includes $7.3 trillion in spending and $5.5 trillion in tax revenue, bringing the deficit for 2025 to nearly $1.8 trillion.
He promised during the 2020 campaign to propose a new tax on people earning more than $400,000 per year that would help pay for entitlements, but that idea has not been a part of any of his budgets so far.
The president campaigned heavily during the 2022 midterm elections on a message that Republicans would put Social Security and Medicare “on the chopping block” every five years, in reference to a proposal from Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) that would have Congress vote to reauthorize all federal spending twice a decade.
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Biden’s State of the Union speech likely indicates he will pursue a similar messaging strategy in the general election, even as Trump vows to protect both programs.
The budget proposal Biden released Monday does include a call for raising Medicare tax rates from 3.8% to 5% for people making more than $400,000 a year while requiring billionaires to pay a 25% wealth tax. The Supreme Court could soon rule on the constitutionality of the latter proposal.
