President Joe Biden has challenged House Republicans, specifically House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), to make a counter-offer to his $7 trillion federal budget, a document that will frame the coming debt ceiling fight.
“I want to make it clear: I’m ready to meet with the speaker anytime tomorrow if he has his budget,” Biden said Thursday in Philadelphia. “Lay it down; tell me what you want to do. I’ll show you what I want to do.”
BIDEN LAUNCHES OPENING SALVO IN DEBT CEILING FIGHT AGAINST GOP WITH BUDGET RELEASE
Biden pitched his fiscal 2024 budget as meeting a campaign promise while he is poised to announce a reelection bid, emphasizing, for example, his spending on public safety.
“If they say they want to cut the deficit, but their plans would explode the deficit, how are they going to make the math work?” he added of Republicans. “What are they going to cut?”
Biden underscored how his budget would decrease next year’s deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years, which is relative to his and former President Donald Trump’s pandemic spending. He also advocates extending Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund by increasing the Medicare tax rate for people earning more than $400,000 from 3.8% to 5% and reinvesting savings from the Inflation Reduction Act’s prescription drug negotiation provisions into the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. He additionally asked for $835 billion in defense spending and a 5.2% pay raise for federal employees.
Before the budget’s release, Biden had criticized Republicans, particularly Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), for considering automatically “sun-setting” of programs, including Social Security and Medicare. But despite doing so, his budget provides scant details regarding the former.
White House Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young defended Biden’s focus on Medicare instead of Social Security.
“The No. 1 threat to Social Security and benefits for folks like my 94-year-old grandfather are those from the other side of the aisle who said they want to cut benefits,” she told reporters beforehand. “Folks who have paid into the system their entire working lives should not have the threat of benefits pulled from out under them.”
Young projected optimism that there can be bipartisan cooperation concerning the budget and the debt ceiling, but in the same response, scrutinized Republicans who she said are using the debt ceiling “as a threat, as leverage.”
“That’s what we think is unacceptable,” she added. “That should be handled without conditions just like congressional Republicans did for the last president three times. Do it for this president, do it for the country. We’re saying, ‘Don’t wreck this economy over politics.'”
In return, House Republican leadership condemned Biden for “proposing out-of-control spending and delaying debt negotiations, following his pattern of shrugging and ignoring when faced with a crisis.”
“Despite the federal government collecting as much in taxes from American families as at any point in our history, federal spending is rising even faster, and our debt is soaring, burdening hardworking families across America,” McCarthy, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), House Republican Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said. “This is a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”
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Bipartisan Policy Center senior vice president Bill Hoagland, a budget expert, contended $3 trillion in deficit reduction is “not going to reduce the level of debt to GDP by a significant amount.”
“They need well into the $6 to $8 trillion mark to stabilize the level of debt to GDP,” he said. “You do have to negotiate; you have to find some sort of a compromise. And that’s why I think that setting some sort of a cap on [2024] discretionary spending will certainly allow for Republicans to claim that they have saved some money and to move forward.”
