Brown, Renacci avoid talking debt solutions

WASHINGTON — With federal deficits soaring out of control, neither Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown nor Republican challenger Jim Renacci is offering a prescription for curbing the debt that eventually could threaten the U.S. economy and raise interest rates.

With Renacci backing the big tax cut signed last year by President Donald Trump and Brown opposed to restraining the growth in federal spending for health and retirement programs, the outcome of the election might merely continue the stalemate in Washington that has produced debt loads not seen since the end of World War II.

Budget analysts say bringing the debt held by the public under control would require a combination of tax increases on all households and controls on the growth of federal programs such as Social Security; Medicare, which covers health costs for the elderly; and Medicaid, which provides health coverage for low-income people.

“The country faces a massive fiscal challenge with national debt at near record levels,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan public policy organization in Washington.

“There is no conceivable way this will get fixed without addressing entitlement spending and taxes,” she said. “Politicians looking at one side of the budget or proposing to make things worse are not leveling with voters on what has to happen to get serious about the debt.”

So far, Brown and Renacci are staying in their respective corners. Brown said he was “not going to play this game that we give these huge tax cuts to rich people and then we’re going to pay for them by going after the most vulnerable people that average $1,200 a month in their Social Security check.”

“We’re going to make a lot of people work with their hands, and their bodies and their minds have to wait another two years to get their Medicare?” Brown said. “We give tax (cuts) to rich people and then make their employees wait two or three more years before they’re eligible for Medicare? Sorry.”

Renacci, a four-term member of the U.S. House from Wadsworth, west of Akron, said the “driver of the debt” is not the 10-year, $1.5 trillion tax cut Congress approved last year, but the country’s changing demographics, in which millions of baby boomers are retiring and becoming eligible for Social Security and Medicare.

“We have a problem where people are retiring at a clip of 10,000 people a day since 2010, and we have a system that was set up based on people dying at the age of 65,” said Renacci, referring to President Franklin Roosevelt signing Social Security into law in 1935.

“That system isn’t working anymore and we need to fix the system,” Renacci said. “We have too many people that are living past 65. God bless them, that’s a positive, but it was not planned when the system was put in place.”

Polls show that voters do not consider the debt a major issue. One Republican pollster said his surveys show the top three issues are the economy, health care and Social Security, while curbing the deficit barely raises a blip.

In addition, Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said the debt is “just not on most people’s radar. There are more things people are concerned about, and although there have been times when the issue was high profile, this is not one of them.”

“The voters have been bamboozled into believing there is a free lunch,” said Edward Hill, a professor of economics at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. “This is the same level of delusion that a 15-year-old has with their allowance.”

In an ominous report in June, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected that debt held by the public compared to gross domestic product would climb from 78 percent to 100 percent in 2028 and finally 152 percent in 2048, by far the highest in the history of the United States.

Even more alarming, the CBO calculates that to keep debt at its current level of 78 percent compared to the size of the economy, Congress every year would have to increase revenue by 11 percent and slash spending by 10 percent.

“Few things make me angrier than this,” Brown said, complaining that the media “continues to say” that budget deficits are unsustainable and the nation cannot curb the deficit “without cutting Medicare and Social Security. Well, preach against them for the tax cuts.”

Brown can point to the fact that he opposed the major tax cuts last year and in 2001 that helped make the deficit worse. He also has proposed allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which he said would save money.

“Ultimately, this is unsustainable and there will be some kind of a fiscal reckoning,” MacGuineas said. “This debt means our entire economy is on a weak and risky foundation.”