Commentary
Few things have worked better over the decades for Democrats in attracting the votes of those of modest means than declaring that Republicans are trying to throw Grandma out into the snow to die. And President Joe Biden’s speech on Tuesday night continued the tradition.
Go back four decades to when President Ronald Reagan and the Democrats’ House Speaker Tip O’Neill agreed to a compromise that promised long-term solvency for the Social Security system “sufficient to pay scheduled benefits in full
through 2057,” which
included rendering half of the value of Social Security benefits subject to taxation, accelerating payroll tax increases, and raising the age for full retirement at a point long down the road.
That deal conjured the apparently incurable myth that Tip and Ronnie were bosom drinking buddies who couldn’t wait for 6 p.m. to arrive every day so they could hit the golf links together. The truth is that Reagan was snookered into O’Neill’s promise of three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in taxes raised. The taxes were imposed, alright, but the cuts in expenditures from the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress never arrived, and Democrats never intended to allow them to arrive.
The Greenspan Social Security commission on which the deal was based failed to foresee reductions in the national birth rate, and today the Social Security trustees
warn that the combined Social Security trust funds are on track to depletion by 2035. When the Social Security system was enacted into law in 1935 there were about 45 workers paying into the system for every one beneficiary; today the ratio is 3 to 1 thanks to extended lifespan and fewer births. By the middle of the next decade it will be about 2 to 1.
O’Neill bullied Reagan with vicious, personal rhetoric, including
charges that the 40th president had “made a target of the politically weak, the poor, the working people,” that the economic policies that brought “morning again in America,” so much so that 49 states voted to re-elect Reagan in 1984, were really just “one big Christmas party for the rich.”
At the bipartisan passage of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981, O’Neill called it “a great day for the aristocracy of the world.” In 1984, O’Neill said, “The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.”
And yet the 70-year-old O’Neill was happy to
stand aside Reagan as he signed the 1983 Social Security reforms into law, and take credit for purportedly saving the system for the next 70-plus years.
Fast forward to
President Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 7. “Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years,” Biden warned. “That means if Congress doesn’t vote to keep them, those programs will go away. ... If anyone tries to cut Social Security, I will stop them.”
The “some Republicans” to whom Biden refers is primarily Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, an honest, successful businessman who has sinned against the Swamp by daring to bring accountability and democratic review to the monstrous legislation Congress routinely passes.
Scott’s proposal would
require that all federal legislation sunset in five years. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” Scott submits, extolling the kind of pure common sense that drives the typical politician to fits of hysteria. “To suggest that this means I want to cut Social Security or Medicare is a lie.” And Scott asks of Biden, “Does he think I also intend to get rid of the U.S. Navy? Or the border patrol?”
Is this really more extreme than
what Sen. Joe Biden proposed in 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas: a freeze of all federal spending, including Social Security and the other entitlements, for a year? It even included, as Biden described it at the time, a provision “that we cannot increase the debt limit again until we have acted on a budget freeze”—kind of like what he was accusing Republicans of Tuesday night: “Some of my Republican friends want to take the economy hostage unless I agree to their economic plans. ... if we don’t cut Social Security and Medicare, they’ll let America default on its debt for the first time in our history.”
In 1975, as a freshman senator, Biden
proposed practically the same plan Rick Scott is now offering. And if you dismiss that as ancient history of questionable relevance, in 2018 former-Vice President Biden told (
pdf) the Brookings Institution, “We need to do something about Social Security and Medicare. That’s the only way you can find room to pay for it. ... Social Security and Medicare can stay. It still needs adjustments, but can stay.”
Biden and other powerful Democrats have been attacked from the left, including by supporters of democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, for supporting such “adjustments.” As leftist magazine
In These Times complained during the 2020 presidential campaign, “The Democratic Party establishment, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have traditionally embraced” the view that “some combination of payroll tax increases and benefit cuts will be required to ‘protect’ or ’modernize’ the program.”
In other words, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer want to save Social Security and Medicare as much as Rick Scott does, and in some respects in a similar fashion. But they want to wait until they’re sure their party can get the full political credit for doing it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
