Whatever happens next in the debt ceiling fight between President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans, the battle lines for 2024 are already drawn.
Biden is saying Republicans will gut Social Security and Medicare while the GOP shoots back that the president is going to raise taxes.
For as much as politics have changed in the last eight years, the argument between Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is one that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would have recognized.
REPUBLICANS CONTROL THE HOUSE. NOW WHAT CAN THEY DO?
Biden workshopped his lines on the big entitlement programs for senior citizens on the campaign trail before the midterm elections last year.
Republicans have railed against tax-and-spend liberal Democrats since Biden was a senator from Delaware voting against the Reagan tax cuts.
But the battle has taken on new urgency now that Biden has unveiled his federal budget proposal while demanding that the new Republican majority in the House do the same.
“So, I want to make it clear. I’m ready to meet with the speaker anytime — tomorrow, if he has his budget,” Biden said in Philadelphia. “Lay it down. Tell me what you want to do. I’ll show you what I want to do. See what we can agree on. What we don’t agree on, let’s see what we — we vote on.”
But Biden has already presented his version of what the Republicans’ budget will be, despite their denials.
“Let’s be clear about another key point of my budget,” he said. “I guarantee you I will protect Social Security and Medicare without any change. Guaranteed. I won’t allow it to be gutted or eliminated, as MAGA Republicans have threatened to do.”
The Republican budget, it seems, is either a caricature of a Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) proposal or something out of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
“MAGA Republicans’ proposal is not an answer on Social Security,” Biden continued. “And my budget will not cut benefits. And it will — definitely won’t sunset programs, like some of my MAGA Republican friends want to do.”Scott recently revised his plan to specifically exempt Social Security and Medicare, in response to its becoming a Biden punching bag.
Biden did acknowledge Republicans’ State of the Union denials that they will cut Social Security or Medicare, saying they had better keep their word.
“Well, guess what?” he said. “They’re all on camera.”
Republicans have their own characterizations of Biden’s plans, emphasizing that they include tax increases.
“President Biden’s ‘budget’ is dead on arrival,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) said in a statement. “It’s a campaign wishlist of tax hikes and fuzzy math that would do nothing to help Hoosiers struggling with Biden’s inflation crisis.”
“Any budget request that focuses on tax hikes and more spending rather than cutting spending and easing the economic burden on this country is deeply unserious — this budget doesn’t have an ounce of serious proposals in it,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) said in a statement. “The federal government doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.”
The Republican National Committee circulated a clip of Biden making this Walter Mondale-like statement in remarks previewing the budget late last month: “I’m gonna raise some taxes.”
Mondale lost 49 states in the 1984 presidential election.
If voters believe the tax increases will be confined to the wealth and won’t curtail economic growth, the political consequences for Biden and the Democrats may be limited.
But if Social Security and Medicare are the third rail of American politics, raising taxes isn’t far behind.
The president’s job approval rating is already more than 20 points underwater, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Further complicating matters, the battle of the budgets isn’t just about 2024. In the coming months, the debt ceiling will need to be addressed. That’s a real deadline, not just political theater.
Until then, it’s tax increases versus cutting entitlements to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy — a perennial partisan political fight as old as Biden’s career in Washington.
