One of the major 2020 Democrats is actually talking about reducing the federal budget deficit and the threat posed by the $23 trillion national debt. It sounds too good to be true because it is.
“Moderate” Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is just using fiscal responsibility as a talking point against his top rival, Bernie Sanders, ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. Mayor Pete’s actual policy agenda belies his professed concern for fiscal responsibility. Maybe lip service is better than nothing — or maybe not.
As reported by NBC News, Buttigieg’s controversial comments came during a Sunday campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he called addressing the national debt an “important” issue and said his administration would work to reduce the debt even though it’s “not fashionable in progressive circles.”
Buttigieg made some very valid points, such as talking about the vast sums that taxpayers are shelling out to pay interest on the debt each year, and how that $382 billion is basically flushed down the drain. The candidate also wisely noted that the current economic expansion under President Trump won’t last forever, and if the debt is this bad during boom times, it will only get much worse during the next recession. But he quickly pivoted to using the debt issue as a barb against his political opponents, chiefly Trump and Sanders.
“I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable owning this issue,” Buttigieg said, “Because I see what’s happening under this president — a $1 trillion deficit — and his allies in Congress do not care. So we have to do something about it.”
This is a perfectly valid point. Trump ran as a fiscal conservative, promising to eliminate the entire national debt in eight years. Instead, he has presided over $1 trillion deficits and just released a whopping $4.8 budget that pretty much abandons fiscal conservatism altogether. Buttigieg is right to hit Trump on this — but would he really be any better?
All signs indicate the opposite. A Buttigieg administration would likely blow up the debt much worse than Trump has.
For a supposedly “centrist” candidate, Buttigieg sure has proposed a lot of new spending (even if it’s not as much as Sanders). He has signaled support for the idea of a Green New Deal framework, for instance. The specifics of what he supports are unclear, but anything even close to the $93 trillion package proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would bust the federal budget wide open. Oh, and Buttigieg basically supports “Medicare for all,” but he just advocates a “public option” as a brief transition period, meaning we’d almost certainly end up with a budget-breaking, socialist healthcare system under his leadership, too.
Where is this professed support for fiscal responsibility manifesting itself in Buttigieg’s agenda?
Still, it makes for a strong argument against his biggest rival, Sanders. “We’ve figured out how to deliver health care to every American without a $20-, $30-, $40 trillion price tag,” Buttigieg said. “Or according to one of my competitors, an ‘I don’t know’ price tag.”
Shots fired. He’s entirely right that Sanders agenda is fiscally unfeasible as it is politically radical. And it is nice to hear a Democrat saying the right things when it comes to fiscal responsibility. But it’s ultimately meaningless until Buttigieg is actually willing to back the talk with commitment to real reforms.
