Battle lines drawn over Trump’s plan
Democrats say cuts may put Social Security, Medicare at risk
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown barreled into a regular Capitol Hill luncheon with his fellow Democrats on April 27 fuming and waving a Wall Street Journal opinion editorial calling for funding President Trump’s proposed tax cuts “the Reagan way,” including gradually raising the Social Security retirement age.
For Brown and other Democrats, the column underscored the urgency in shifting decadeslong messaging about GOP tax cuts by casting them mainly as a giveaway to the rich. As Senate Democrats draw the battle lines over Trump’s proposed tax plan, they are borrowing an argument from their predecessors who fought former president Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts 35 years ago — by tying them directly to potential future cuts in Social Security and Medicare for the middle class and poor.
“It took less than 24 hours and they are already trying to raise the retirement age to pay for these corporate handouts,” Brown told his colleagues, ac- cording to a source who was in the room but unauthorized to speak on the record. The editorial ran shortly after Trump released his one-page tax plan summary. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer reprised the editorial — and Brown’s comments — in a Tuesday luncheon this week, the source said.
Earlier in the day, Schumer had taken to the Senate floor to say the Trump tax plan will intentionally explode the deficit so that “down the line they’ll start howling ” and say “oh, we have no choice” but to cut Social Security and Medicare.
“This has been the nefarious goal of the hard right for decades,” said Schumer. A number of congressional Republicans contend that tax cuts should not be counted towards the federal deficit because of “dynamic scoring,” or increased economic growth that yields additional tax revenue. Yet, in a sign of the potential struggles ahead, even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has poured cold water on a tax plan that explodes the national debt, saying lawmakers should find offsets to pay for the cuts.
The comments from both Brown and Schumer resurrect some of the fiery populist language from Democrats, including the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, in disputing Reagan’s contention that his 1981 tax cuts favoring the wealthy would pay for themselves.
They also signal how Democrats plan to make a play for Trump’s working-class voters, by arguing their Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits are at risk. Trump has vowed not to touch Medicare and Social Security.
Yet the Trump “skinny” budget that proposes deep cuts to U.S. government programs is reminiscent of Reagan’s first budget. Then-budget director David Stockman called the underlying conservative philosophy of dramatic cuts to government programs “starving the beast.” Reagan later struck a deal with Democrats to shore up Social Security. “The bipartisan Social Security legislation enacted during the Reagan administration provides a useful history lesson for how to offset deficit increases,” including raising the age of eligibility for full Social Security benefits from 65 to 67, conservative columnist Martin Feldstein argued in his recent Wall Street
Journal editorial. Still, according to Chuck Blahous, a former Social Security and Medicare public trustee, Reagan’s 1983 Social Security deal would never had been struck for general deficit reduction and unless Social Security hadn’t faced its own deficit. Faced with steep annual deficits, Reagan later signed several measures, including closing some tax loopholes that offset the effects of his prior tax cuts. In a 1985 New York
Times article, Moynihan was still insisting that “the principal purpose of the tax cut was to provide a basis upon which to shrink government.”