“Who says there is no bipartisanship in the age of Trump?” Yuval Levin and James Capretta asked in our October 1 issue. “When it comes to federal deficits and debt, the parties have never been more aligned.”
Depressingly true. Unlike previous Republican presidents, Donald Trump has vowed to keep the drivers of government deficits—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—more or less as they are. Given his concomitant pledges to dramatically increase spending on infrastructure and the military, all hope for reigning in America’s dependence on borrowed money would seem to be at an end. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the federal deficit will top $1 trillion. This year the national debt amounts to 78 percent of our entire economy. In another 10 years, the CBO forecasts, the debt will rise to 148 percent of the economy. That this is happening in relative peacetime – with the US having withdrawn from Iraq and apparently desperate to end involvement in Afghanistan — is without historical precedent.
This isn’t the ordinary political problem. Failure to control the U.S. government’s exploding obligations to the beneficiaries of these programs will—not maybut will—result in the gradual and permanent collapse of the U.S. economy. As the government struggles to pay for the three big entitlement programs, the number of people “entitled” to those benefits grows larger and larger. Advances in medical care mean people live longer and draw more for longer from the programs, and laws like the Affordable Care Act, even if well-meaning, vastly increase the number of people eligible for Medicaid. Eventually even a robust economy won’t be unable to keep up, and an economic downturn will mean cataclysm.
One can argue about the precise numbers or the value of this or that proposed remedy, but it’s at this point undeniable that entitlement spending, if left unchecked, will debilitate our economy. The best argument against doing anything about entitlements is the crass political one: People just aren’t that interested in mind-numbing analyses of budget trends, and you can’t win elections against opponents who accuse you of wanting to slash grandma’s Social Security check.
And yet.
In North Dakota, Republican House member Kevin Cramer appears destined to unseat the state’s junior senator, Heidi Heitkamp, even as he campaigns openly on the need to reform Social Security and Medicaid. Cramer has spoken frequently about raising the cap on Social Security earnings and increasing the Medicare eligibility age—both of which would at least shore up the program’s mid- to long-term viability. Cramer also defends the idea, famously but unsuccessfully tried by George W. Bush, of allowing taxpayers to divert some of their Social Security earnings to privatized accounts.
These are tough stances to defend, not because they’re unsound but because they lend themselves to alarmist accusations by opponents. Yet Cramer leads Heitkamp, according to the latest poll of likely North Dakota voters, by as much as 16 points. Granted, Heitkamp has made a series of disastrous tactical errors, most recently in publishing the names and towns of several sexual assault victims in a television ad without their consent. But this is a year in which Democrats enjoy considerable political advantages, and her relentless attacks on Cramer for wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits have made no difference.
Meanwhile, the mere mention by Mitch McConnell that Congress’s failure to reform entitlement spending is a “bipartisan problem”—an “unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by [not] doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future”—seems to have given Democrats all they needed to claim the GOP wants to starve the aged. Jacky Rosen, in a fight to unseat Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada, used McConnell’s comment to claim the GOP wants to “balance our budget on the backs of senior citizens.”
McConnell is right that it’s a bipartisan problem—you can’t reform the U.S. government’s three largest budget commitments by slim majority party-line votes. Yet, as Kevin Cramer is proving in North Dakota, some voters are sharp enough to see through the demagoguery.
