OK, I’m kidding, of course. But now that I have your attention, it looks like we’re going to go through the entire 2024 election cycle without any serious discussion about spending, deficits, or debt.
That may be depressing, but it’s probably what voters want.
We had a chance to debate this issue a few weeks ago, but the debate that ended Joe Biden’s political career will go down in history as just that: it will certainly not be remembered as a meaningful examination of the current financial state of the country.
when The topic of debt did come up.But neither candidate offered a meaningful answer. Donald Trump said he was “ready to start paying down the debt” in his first term. Biden suggested he could “erase this debt” by simply raising taxes on the country’s 1,000 billionaires. Trump’s answer was likely vague enough to avoid a full rebuttal. Biden’s answer was far from precise: If you tax 1,000 people at $1 billion, you’ll raise $1 trillion, which is less than 3% of the current debt.
social security was also discussedWell, yes. The program faces across-the-board automatic benefit cuts of about 25% by 2035.And while it hasn’t contributed a cent to the national debt yet (think about it), this is definitely a pressing fiscal issue. Biden’s nearly incomprehensible response on this issue was, “By increasing it from 1 percent…that 1 percent will keep us solvent.” When he finished a sensible sentence, it was only to repeat the debunked assertion that Trump wants to “abolish Social Security.”
President Trump’s response has been to focus on illegal immigration.
Incidentally, the word “spending” only came up three times in the debate, and all of these were in reference to aid to Ukraine.
It is fair to say that last week’s Republican Convention did not produce much progress on this issue. Party platform A statement released at the start of the rally mentioned spending just once: “Republicans will immediately stabilize the economy by cutting wasteful government spending and promoting economic growth.”
That’s encouraging, of course, and consistent with Republican orthodoxy. But while the number of words doesn’t necessarily match the agenda priorities, budget hawks failed to notice that the platform spends more time talking about protecting national parks and “promoting the aesthetic beauty” of public buildings than it does about spending.
But we have to give the Republicans credit: at least they mention spending and deficits in their platform. And Trump mentioned those topics. It’s hard to imagine Democrats using this issue in keynote speeches more than as a justification for “making the wealthy pay their fair share,” if they even bring it up at all.
Of course, there’s a reason both parties avoid this issue, and it’s the same reason we’re over $35 trillion in debt: voters simply don’t care.
A few years ago, when Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House, I pressed a senior Republican official on this issue, arguing that if we didn’t solve it now, no one would. “We could solve it,” he told me. “We could take the drastic steps necessary to balance the budget, we could strengthen Social Security, maybe we could do something about Medicaid. But everybody would hate us, we’d lose the next election. Or the next three or four elections, and the Democrats would come in and immediately undo everything we’d done. We’d still have the debt, we’d still have the huge deficit, our benefits would still be bankrupt. Everything would be exactly the same, except taxes would go up, the economy would be in a bad shape, and we’d be very unpopular. Nobody’s going to vote for Scrooge.”
It may be depressing, but in a Washington filled with issue-avoidance, the answer was refreshingly candid.
And he wasn’t wrong. A leading Republican senator once told President Trump about his dramatic spending overhauls in the 2024 federal budget, one of the last to actually propose a balanced budget: “Nobody in this town has lost their job because we spent too much. Anyone has lost their job because we spent too little.”
People who run for office talk about what people want them to talk about. They focus on the issues that matter to the people they represent. And right now, voters don’t care about spending.
The Republican was right in opining that any spending restraints enacted by the GOP would likely be quickly reversed by the next Democratic administration. But the situation is even worse than that. Even the small gains that the Tea Party made in 2011 and 2013 by leveraging the GOP leadership and the Obama administration have been lost in the years since. And some of that reversal was at the hands of other Republicans.
The rules of both the House and the Senate, and perhaps more importantly the rules of the ballot box, favor spending and growing deficits. So the only real solution is to change the rules. A zero-based budget approach might help. The Balanced Budget Amendment, once hugely popular among Republicans, would get even more done.
But it seems that neither party intends to talk about those things in this election.
Mick Mulvaney A former congressman from South Carolina and NewsNation contributor, he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.
