Some GOP fiscal hawks fly far away from deficit fights

Trump, DeSantis now step up for Social Security

The first skirmish of the Republican presidential primary of 2024 broke through this past weekend. It was not over a traditional theme of conservative politics, such as national defense, or more contemporary issues like immigration or “woke” social policy.

Instead, the political organizations of former president Donald Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida put their candidates forward as the guardians of the Democratic Party’s most precious policy legacies: Social Security and Medicare.

The jousting between Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, and DeSantis, his undeclared and closest rival, signaled that after a decade of soaring debt and political silence from both parties, any grappling with the nation’s worsening fiscal condition will not be shaped by the Republican White House contenders. The party that once prided itself on clear-eyed fiscal truth-telling — a message marred, without doubt, by successive tax-cutting — is still having none of it.

And that signal came at a most inopportune moment, as House Republican leaders are girding for a fight over the government’s borrowing limit, linking any increase in the debt ceiling with tough spending cuts that the leaders of the party in 2024 show no interest in.

“The facts are still on our side, and history is on our side,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who guided the fiscal policies of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “It’s just a bad era.”

There was nothing particularly Republican in the exchange of advertisements posted by the super PACs of Trump and DeSantis. On Friday, Make America Great Again Inc., a Trump-aligned political action committee, started running an advertisement declaring, “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements, like cutting Medicare, slashing Social Security, even raising our retirement age.”

The DeSantis-linked Never Back Down PAC responded by accusing Trump of “repeating lies about Social Security,” then showed DeSantis saying, “We’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans.”

With that backdrop, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California went on Monday to the New York Stock Exchange to try to prod President Biden into negotiations on the deficit, telling leaders in finance, “I want to talk to you about the debate that is not happening in Washington but should be happening over our national debt,” then adding, “America deserves to hear the truth.”

The problem with that truth is the math: With Republicans vowing once again not to raise taxes, exempting Social Security and Medicare from spending cuts would mean everything else funded by the federal government would need to be cut in half to balance the budget by 2033, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group that is highly critical of both parties.

If the Social Security and Medicare exemption was extended to the military at a time when Republicans want to confront the threat from China, everything else would need to be cut by 70 percent. If veterans programs were also protected, Medicaid and a host of other programs — food stamps, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, agricultural subsidies, food safety inspections, federal student aid, air traffic controllers, weather forecasters, National Parks, health care for the poor and self-employed, and much more — would need to be cut by 78 percent.

“Trump figured out in 2016 that an older, more working class, more populist party would become increasingly against fixing Social Security and Medicare, and he was right,” said Brian Riedl, who served as a budget adviser to former senator Rob Portman of Ohio and is now a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “It’s clearly good politics to recast yourself as the defender of Social Security and Medicare. It’s just bad for the country.”