Conservative Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says he will force the Senate to vote this week on cutting total federal spending by 5 percent in each of the next two years, a proposal that would include Social Security and Medicare.
It’s an uncomfortable vote for Senate Republicans, one which it divides their conference.
Talking about cuts to Social Security has been called the third rail of politics.
A “no” vote opens GOP senators to criticism from conservatives who say that policymakers who exempt Social Security from reform are not serious about balancing the budget.
A “yes” vote risks alienating seniors and other voters who are worried about seeing their Social Security and Medicare benefits cut.
Paul says that under his plan, lawmakers could decide to exempt Social Security and Medicare from cuts, but they would have to fit those programs under the strict spending caps laid out in his “conservative alternative” to the deal negotiated by President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Republicans have spent months running away from the accusation President Biden leveled at his “State of the Union” address that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare.
Now, they find themselves having to vote on deep, across-the-board funding cuts that would likely affect those programs.
McCarthy took Social Security and Medicare cuts off the table early in the year. Some conservatives think that was a mistake.
Paul says that under his proposal, “there would be an absolute top-line number for the entire budget that over the next two years would be on its way to balance in five years.”
He says the McCarthy-Biden plan falls short of making a meaningful dent in the federal deficit because “they’re only really looking at non-military discretionary” spending, which accounts for only 17 percent of the federal budget.
He argued that mandatory spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare are the biggest drivers of the debt.
“Mandatory spending is enormous. It’s over half of the spending every year; it’s going up at 5 percent a year,” Paul said.
“This specular deal that we’ve gotten tries to slow down spending on nonmilitary discretionary [spending,] so it does nothing,” he added with a dose of sarcasm.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), another outspoken critic of the Biden-McCarthy deal, says mandatory spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare do "have to be considered" as part of any meaningful deficit reduction deal.
Lee said a 5 percent, across-the-board reduction in federal spending will be criticized as “abrupt” or “draconian,” but he argues the consequences of letting the debt continue to grow by a couple trillion dollars every year are scary.
“If you want to talk at draconian and abrupt, look at what happens the moment our borrowing costs because of our profligate spending practices and because of interest rates and other factors … returns to the historical average of five percent,” he said.
“Our annual interest payments will very quickly go up well over a trillion dollars a year,” he warned. “It could easily exceed … our entire defense budget, and within a few years, we could see our total interest on debt outlays even coming to exceed our entire discretionary spending outlays.”
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who will also vote against the debt limit bill, said federal spending as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product has gone into “the stratosphere.”
“You got to make those hard decisions like any real leader would do,” he said.
He says Social Security and Medicare, which he called "the drivers" of the debt, should be on the negotiating table “in terms of saving it.”
“Sooner or later, the programs that drive the structural deficits” such as Social Security and Medicare “will have to be looked at, and everybody knows that here,” Braun said.
Paul’s proposal is expected to pick up only a few votes, because Republicans don’t want to give Democrats any political ammunition ahead of the 2024 election.
Biden and Senate Democrats have hammered the GOP relentlessly over the 12 Point Plan to Save America, which Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced last year and calls for a sunset of all federal legislation after a period of five years.
Scott said he never intended to sunset Medicare or Social Security, but that didn’t stop Democrats from using the plan as a bludgeon.
Scott amended it earlier this year to create specific exceptions for Social Security, Medicare, national security and veterans benefits.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who supports the debt limit deal, said Paul and other conservatives are correct that “you can’t balance the budget solely on discretionary spending.”
“I don’t see how, in the context of raising the debt ceiling, that you could have gotten anything more than Kevin McCarthy got," Cramer said.
But he said McCarthy probably took Social Security and Medicare off the table too early in the debate.
Asked if that was a mistake, Cramer said, “yeah, I think it was.”
But he argued it might have been the right political move.
“You have this crazy political game going on where everybody out-Social Security the other people instead of being straight up and honest with the American public and say, ‘We won’t do any harm to anybody’s existing Social Security, and we’re going to have a forward-leaning solution,'” he said.
Cramer acknowledged Congress “missed the opportunity, so to speak” to make big fiscal reforms to Social Security and Medicare but he said the “threat of default is so big” that it limited how bold Republicans could be in making demands.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has said in the past that split party control of government provides a good opportunity to enact big, controversial reform, acknowledged Wednesday it’s been very tough to make any headway on Social Security or Medicare reforms.
“It’s been challenging over the years to get both sides to look at the very large picture,” McConnell told reporters.
But he praised the McCarthy-Biden deal for cutting spending, after Congress increased it by more than $2.7 trillion through two partisan reconciliation bills in 2021 and 2022, under Democratic control of Congress.
“At least we’re going in a different direction,” he said.
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