Mar.12

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Biden Has a Budget

What a strange system the U.S. has. The budget for FY 2023-24 isn't complete, to the point that the government may soon shut down. And yet, entirely on the customary schedule, Joe Biden unveiled his proposed budget for FY 2024-25 yesterday.

In case you missed his State of the Union, or you heard it but didn't believe Biden was really going to unleash his inner populist, well, it's a budget that would make fellow Democrat William Jennings Bryan proud. Here are the key elements:

• Social Security: This is the biggie. The Biden budget proposal states outright that he will "reject any efforts to cut or undermine the Medicare or Social Security benefits that seniors and people with disabilities have earned and paid into their entire working lives." Instead, Biden wants to stabilize the two entitlements by increasing Medicare taxes on people making over $400,000 per year.
  
  Needless to say, Donald Trump must reflexively take the opposite position of Biden on all issues. And so, the former president, appearing on CNBC, told anchor Joe Kernan:

  [T]here is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There's tremendous amounts of things, numbers of things you can do.

  Obviously, if Trump becomes president again, the U.S. will have the best entitlements ever, entitlements so great you'll get tired of how great the entitlements are. Big, beautiful entitlements is what we are saying here.
  
  Unfortunately for The Donald, in among that blather was the word "cutting." There are very few things he could say to rattle his base, but suggesting he might cut Social Security... well, he should ask Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) about that. Undoubtedly, the folks in The Villages were not happy campers.
  
  Team Biden just so happened to catch the interview, and the President quickly made hay of the remark, telling a crowd in New Hampshire that Trump and Republicans "want to put Social Security and Medicare back on the chopping block," and that "I'm never going to allow that to happen." Meanwhile, Team Trump spent the afternoon doing damage control, although there's only so much they could do, since "cutting" isn't exactly ambiguous.
  
  
• Corporate Taxes: Biden also wants to reverse much of the 2017 tax cut, which lowered the corporate rate from 35% to 21%, and put the rate back up to 28%.
  
  
• Individual Taxes: The greater amount of money coming in from corporations would be used, in part, to restore the pandemic-era expansion of the Child Tax Credit, and to cut the tax burden for working-class people by $765 billion over the next decade.
  
  
• Students: Biden wants to forgive more student loan debt, while also spending $12 billion to increase Pell Grants for current students.
  
  
• Food: Biden wants to increase WIC (food assistance for women, infants and children) by $700 million, up to $7.7 billion. House Republicans do not like this idea; they want to make it harder for people to qualify for the program. You don't need us to tell you which side of that argument sounds better on the campaign trail.
  
  
• Ukraine: Biden wants money for Ukraine. The $95 billion package that passed the Senate last month, and has money for Israel and Taiwan, too, would be a swell start.
  
  
• Rural Eco-lectrification: Biden wants to increase funding (which Republicans just cut) for renewable energy in rural communities. Shades of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

If Biden's budget was adopted lock, stock and barrel, and if the projections are on target, then it would mean a $1.6 trillion outlay in discretionary spending in 2024-25, a total in line with the agreement Biden struck with former speaker Kevin McCarthy, but a total that is also way higher than the House Republican Conference wants. The Biden budget would also cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next 10 years, which is something that Republicans claim they want, although they obviously don't want to do it by redistributing money from corporations and wealthy people to not-wealthy people.

There is almost no chance that Biden's budget proposal is acted upon prior to November. Again, Congress hasn't even figured out this year's budget, much less next year's, and they pretty much never get the budget done on time. So, the Biden proposal is just a campaign document; a platform to run on. And as far as platforms go, it may be a pretty good one, vote-getting-wise.

The Republicans in the House also have a budget proposal, one that would slash an impressive $14 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. However, there are a few problems. First, it involves deep cuts to the things Democrats (and some Republicans) care about like, say, Medicare. Second, it is extremely fuzzy on critical details in some places. Third, it relies on wildly optimistic economic projections. We're talking "Let's assume that every year in the next 10 is better than any year in the 1920s or 1990s." We note this because Republicans are going to run on it, of course, but also because it puts Biden's proposal in context. That is to say, if $14 trillion is on the crazy side, then $3 trillion is plausible.

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign will undoubtedly spend much time today trying to think of ways to get Trump to comment again on his willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare. Maybe they can claim that if John McCain and Hillary Clinton agreed on one thing, it was the importance of increasing Social Security and Medicare. (Z)