The Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives, will soon seek to cut Social Security and Medicare. They intend to do this by holding the economy hostage by threatening to trigger a financial crisis by refusing to raise the sovereign debt ceiling. The interesting questions are why they want to do it, considering it seems politically suicidal, and how Democrats will respond.
Before I go into the unknown, I want to first state that the conspiracy against the social safety net is not a conspiracy theory. The rough form of the plan has been widely circulated for months. The math, too, is clear: it is not possible to achieve large cuts in the budget deficit while depriving the Treasury of the funds needed to prosecute tax evaders without making large cuts in social programs.
And all that aside, now we have it in black and white. CNN obtained a screenshot of a slide presented behind closed doors at last Tuesday’s Republican meeting. The first point calls for a budget balance in 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The second calls for reforms of “mandatory spending”, which, in budgetary jargon, means precisely these programmes. The last point calls for refusing to raise the debt ceiling as long as the above demands are not met.
More information
So the plan is no secret. I just want to add that when Republicans try to reassure Americans who are now retired that their benefits will not be affected, that is an impossible promise if they are serious about balancing the budget in a decade.
But where does this determination to dismantle programs vital to more than 100 million Americans come from? Finally, these services are also hugely popular with Republican voters.
It is true that those who call themselves Republicans are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when asked in a YouGov poll by The Economist which programs they considered socialist, none of the more expensive programs passed the test. Social insurance? He’s not a socialist. Nor is Medicare socialism.
Unfortunately, the survey did not ask about Medicaid, a program for low-income Americans that many Republicans see as a form of “welfare.”
One reason even Republicans support large welfare systems might be that GOP support comes to a dominant proportion of older voters and most of America’s welfare spending is becoming stale. This logically applies to Social Security and Medicare, which take effect when a minimum age is reached. But it’s true of Medicaid, too: most recipients are young, but nearly two-thirds of spending goes to the elderly and disabled, many of whom live in nursing homes.
So the stance of the Republican grassroots seems to be that interventionist government is bad, but getting down to specifics, they shouldn’t cut you, they shouldn’t cut me, they should cut that guy who passed by. This means that the priorities of the new majority in the House of Representatives do not correspond at all with those of their own voters.
And history teaches us that attacks on the security network come with a heavy political price. George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 certainly played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006, and Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi win back the presidency of the House of Representatives in 2018.
So where does the pressure come from? Ronald Reagan left the White House 34 years ago, the current Republican Party seems far less driven by hands-off government ideology than by a desire to wage a culture war, and there is not necessarily a connection between culture war and right economy. For example, the anti-immigrant French National Assembly has taken an economic position slightly to the left of the Macron government.
Put it this way: advocating a welfare state for whites may be politically effective, but America is not going that route.
Here’s what I think is happening: Even now, many, maybe most, Republicans in Congress are not culture wars fanatics. Rather, they are careerists who depend on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades, both for campaign contributions and for their career prospects after leaving Congress. They won’t oppose cranks or conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still to lower taxes on the rich and support the poor and middle class.
And the culture fighters play along because they are basically not interested in the nature of politics.
I’m not exactly sure if this analysis is correct, but the evidence is that at some point this year the Biden administration will have to contend with large-scale economic blackmail, the threat of blowing up the economy if that safety net is not destroyed. And I worry that the Democrats still don’t take this threat seriously enough.
Paul Krugman He is a Nobel laureate in economics. © The New York Times, 2023. Translated from news clips
THE LAND of the morning
Wake up to Berna González Harbor’s analysis of the day
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits