Opinion: Harris, Democrats announce plans to balance the budget

OK. So, I’m obviously joking. But now that I have your attention, it looks like we are set to go through the entire 2024 election cycle without a serious discussion on spending, deficits or the debt.

As depressing as that might be, it is probably what voters want.

There was an opportunity to discuss the issue a few weeks back. But the debate that ended Joe Biden’s political career will go down in history as just that. It certainly won’t be remembered for any meaningful inquiry into the current fiscal state of the nation.

When the topic of the debt did come up , neither candidate offered meaningful answers: Donald Trump said that in his first term we were “ready to start paying down debt.” Biden suggested that by simply raising taxes on the country’s thousand billionaires we could “wipe out this debt.” Trump’s answer probably has enough ambiguity to avoid a complete refutation. Biden’s was nowhere close to being accurate: if you took $1 billion from 1,000 people, you’d raise $1 trillion. That’s less than 3 percent of the current debt.

Social Security was also discussed . Sort of. The program is facing an across-the-board automatic benefit cut of roughly 25 percent by 2035 . And while it hasn’t yet contributed one penny to the national debt (please allow that to sink in), it is certainly a pressing fiscal matter. Biden’s nearly indecipherable response on the issue was that “by increasing from one percent beyond…that one enough will keep it solvent.” When he was able to complete a full sentence, it was only to regurgitate the debunked claim that Trump “wants to get rid of Social Security.”

Trump’s response was to pivot to illegal immigration.

The word “spending,” by the way only came up three times in the debate, each time on the topic of aid to Ukraine.

It’s fair to say that the Republican convention last week didn’t move the needle much on the issue, either. The party platform that was released at the outset of the gathering mentioned spending exactly once: “Republicans will immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending and promoting Economic Growth.”

That’s encouraging, of course. And consistent with Republican orthodoxy. But while the number of words doesn’t necessarily equate to the priority of the topic, it wasn’t lost on budget hawks that the platform spent more time talking about preserving our national parks and “promoting beauty” in public buildings than it did on spending.

But give Republicans credit. At least their platform mentions spending and deficits. And Trump did mention those topics in his keynote speech. It’s hard to imagine the Democrats doing anything more than using the topic to justify “making the rich pay their fair share.” If they raise it at all.

There’s a reason for both parties dodging the issue, of course. And it is the same reason we are over $35 trillion in debt: Voters just don’t care.

A few years back, when Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House, I pressed a high-ranking Republican on the issue, arguing that if we didn’t fix things now, no one would. “We could fix it,” he told me. “We could take the drastic action necessary to balance the budget, we could shore up Social Security, and we might even be able to do something about Medicaid. But everyone would hate us, we’d lose the next election. Or the next three or four. And the Democrats would come in and immediately undo everything we did. We’d still have debt, we’d still have monster deficits, and entitlements would still be broken. Everything would be exactly the same, except that taxes would be higher, the economy would tank and we’d be wildly unpopular. Nobody votes for Scrooge.”

While perhaps depressing, the answer was refreshingly candid in a Washington filled with dodging the issue.

And he wasn’t wrong. As a leading Republican senator once told President Trump, in reference to the dramatic spending reforms of our 2024 proposed federal budget – one of the last to propose actually balancing the budget:  “No one in this town has ever lost his job for spending too much. People have lost for spending too little.”

Candidates for office talk about what people want them to talk about. They focus on the issues that are important to the people they represent. And right now, voters don’t care about spending.

That Republican was right when he opined that any spending restraints implemented by Republicans would likely immediately be undone by the next Democrat-led government. But the situation is even worse than that.  Even the small gains that were leveraged out of Republican leadership and the Obama White House by the Tea party back in 2011 and 2013 fell by the wayside in the following years. And some of the undoing was at the hands of other Republicans.

The rules – both of the House and the Senate, and probably more importantly, the ballot box – favor more spending and more deficits. The only real solution, then, is to change the rules. A zero-based budget approach might help. A balanced budget amendment – which used to be wildly popular in GOP circles – would accomplish even more.

But apparently neither party will be talking about those things this election cycle.

This op-ed is part of The Hill’s “How to Fix America” series exploring solutions to some of America’s most pressing problems.

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.

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