The single biggest thing at stake in next month’s midterm elections has attracted only a sliver of the attention dedicated to subjects such as Dr. Oz’s dog experiments, girls’ high school sports or Hunter Biden’s drug habit. The most important issue in this campaign is the Republican plan to reduce spending on popular social programs and jeopardize the full faith and credit of the US government.
Of course, ignoring boring questions like the disposition of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending in favor of largely content-free cultural disputes is a longstanding tradition in US politics. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense.
Republicans have been somewhat circumspect about their plan, though it’s not exactly a secret. All four House Republicans seeking the top spot on the Budget Committee favor linking the debt ceiling to cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements,” says Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia.
“Entitlements” and “nondiscretionary” are Congress-speak for programs whose eligibility and benefit rules are set by Congress rather than subject to the annual appropriations process. The largest such program is Social Security, followed by Medicare, followed by Medicaid. A few smaller programs, such as Affordable Care Act subsidies, food stamps, and most classes of farm aid and veterans’ benefits, also fall under the non-discretionary umbrella.
These programs account for the large majority of non-military federal spending. So if the goal is to reduce inflation by cutting spending — which is what Republicans keep saying they want to do — then these programs need to be cut.
It has been a bit difficult to have a frank conversation about these issues because every time Republicans hint that this is what they want to do, Democrats pounce and the GOP gets skittish. This happened in February when the head of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, Rick Scott of Florida, released a plan calling for all federal programs to be sunset every five years. That would be the end of federal health and retirement programs as we know it, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly distanced himself from the proposal — but didn’t release any alternative policy agenda.
The Republican House members will also undoubtedly decline to say which specific programs should be cut, lest it be too easy to identify whose oxen they want gored. But the Republican Study Committee did release a budget plan in June that called for cutting Social Security benefits for anyone who retires before 70, raising the Medicare eligibility age to 70, and scheduling the eligibility age for both programs to steadily increase over time. And all of this is over and above their proposed $3.3 trillion cut to Medicaid over 10 years.
The study committee is the largest bloc of House Republicans, though it represents mostly members with safe seats and a GOP majority would likely rein in these plans for sweeping cuts in popular programs. How much it would do so is impossible to say, since House Republicans (like their Senate colleagues) won’t get specific before Nov. 8. But in terms of broad direction, this is clearly where the party is going, with the debt ceiling as a leverage point.
Using the debt ceiling as leverage to try and extract cuts to Medicare and Medicaid is exactly what House Republicans did in 2011, the last time a new majority faced off against an incumbent Democratic president.
Which is a reminder that one of the biggest myths in contemporary politics — popular in both parties — is the idea that there is an interesting “new” conservative movement that has cast aside the small-government orthodoxy of the 2012 presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It’s certainly true that the Republican Party has become home to a cast of more colorful characters and now relies on a much more economically downscale voter base. But its core economic-policy commitments haven’t changed.
Of course, just because Republicans have the same aspirations doesn’t mean they’ll succeed if they win. The last round of debt-ceiling brinksmanship produced economically costly financial uncertainty but was ultimately resolved with cuts to military and domestic discretionary spending, rather than the Medicare privatization that Republicans were pushing for.
A new round of brinksmanship could end up with that same result. It also might work. Or it could fail spectacularly. Whatever happens, however, a Republican win is pretty much a guarantee of a political and economic crisis whose goal is to enact fiscal austerity.
In a sane world, that looming crisis — and the prospect of cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — would be dominating the political debate right now. Unfortunately, as has been clear for some time, sanity is in short supply in US politics.
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Matthew Yglesias at myglesias4@bloomberg.net
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Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net