The budget debate is beginning to become clearer and clearer. President Biden has introduced a budget which has $4.3 trillion in tax increases. It also has increases in spending and leads to a huge deficit. But he has put pretty good language around what he would do. And he’s going to lower the cost of health care, he’s going to save Medicare, he’s going to do a whole range of things. 

At the same time, the House Republicans are trying to find a way to put together a real budget that would get them to balance within 10 years. It’s a very big, very hard challenge, and there’ll be a lot of arguments. The Biden side will argue that any cut is bad, that we should spend more money, not less money, and that all tax increases are good. The Republican side will argue that a big tax increase will kill the economy, slow down economic growth, increase unemployment, and a big spending increase will increase the inflation rate. 

In the work we’ve done at America’s New Majority Project, we discovered that the American people — by a pretty big margin — believe that cutting taxes, cutting regulations, focusing on economic growth, is the best way to save Medicare and Social Security. On the other hand, they also believe that having higher taxes, more spending, bigger government, actually weakens Medicare and Social Security. How this argument works out over the next six months or a year is really important to the future of the American system. And I think you’re going to find that it’s the kind of argument that’s going to get bigger and bigger as people look at all the details. And it’s only going to lead, I think, to be … one of the two or three major issues in the 2024 campaign. With people getting to choose between dramatically bigger government, higher taxes and a weaker economy, or a much smaller government with lower taxes, but a much bigger economy. I think this is one of the key issues in the next few years and well worth paying attention to.