Republicans Rediscover Debt and Deficit Concerns. Will Americans Care?

By Yuval Rosenberg

Republicans Rediscover Debt and Deficit
Concerns. But Will Americans Care?

Republicans lawmakers are gathering in Orlando, Florida this
week for a
three-day retreat to plot policy and strategy,
with an eye toward winning back the House in 18 months.

“There’s going to be a very substantive policy focus,” House GOP
Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY)
told reporters in Washington before the conference
started on Sunday. “What we have to do as Republicans is get back
to being the party of ideas and the substance and the policy of
conservatism, and that’s going to be a big part of the
retreat.”

As the GOP plans its messaging, it’s become clear that many in
the party have rediscovered an issue that had all
but vanished over the four years of the Trump
presidency: debt and deficit fears.

The Washington Post’s Tony Romm and Yeganeh Torbati
report:

“Four years after racking up big bills under President Donald
Trump, the party’s strategy is becoming clear: Republicans are
straining to revive their message of fiscal discipline now that
Democrats are in charge.
“The renewed Republican commitment to austerity marks a shift
for a party that had lined up to advance Trump’s policies to build
a border wall and expand the U.S. military with few objections,
even as Congress added trillions of dollars to the deficit in the
process. And it threatens to complicate the future of Biden’s
economic agenda, including his proposed $2 trillion in upgrades to
the nation’s aging infrastructure — and a plan to be unveiled this
week that dedicates $1.8 trillion to
families and child care.”

As President Joe Biden and Democrats embrace the idea that
government can address the nation’s economic inequities and social
challenges — and propose trillions of dollars in new spending
programs to do so — Republicans see a messaging opportunity.
“Support for Republicans will only grow as voters learn about
Democrats’ wasteful spending,” says a new
polling report prepared for the National
Republican Congressional Committee and highlighted by Punchbowl News.

The report says, for example, that 71% of independents in
battleground districts are less likely to vote for “a Democrat who
voted for a 2.3 trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that spends 93%
on things OTHER than improving our roads and bridges." (The
Washington Post’s fact-checker called that attack line against
Biden’s infrastructure plan that
“highly misleading,” but that’s not likely to
prevent Republicans from continuing to use it anyway.)

But Biden’s plans are popular…and fiscal conservatism has
waned: One problem with that approach is that Biden’s spending
plans — and his proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the
wealthy — have proven to have broad public support, according to
polls. At the same time, Republicans acknowledge that fiscal
conservatism no longer resonates with the party’s base in the way
that it did in the heyday of the Tea Party movement.

The Hill’s Alexander Bolton
reports: “Republicans are having a tough time
generating the same outrage over Biden’s multitrillion-dollar
spending agenda as they did over former President Obama’s signature
initiatives: the American Relief and Reinvestment Act and the
Affordable Care Act, which cost far less than what Biden is
proposing on infrastructure.”

That’s one legacy of the Trump presidency. “It wasn’t something
that was an important issue for President Trump, and so many of our
base voters align themselves with President Trump. It’s almost like
now debt, deficits, spending become abstract issues that a lot of
folks aren’t paying attention to and should be,” Sen. John Thune
(R-SD), the Senate Republican Whip, told The Hill. “I’m frankly
very concerned about the level of spending and debt, and I think
Republicans have got to be the adults in the room and exercise the
fiscal responsibility that seems to have been absent, lacking the
last several years.”

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) told The Hill that most politicians are
just using the debt issue to score political points. “Here’s the
sad reality: Almost nobody in Washington, Republican or Democrat,
cares much about the debt, but lots of grandstanders care a lot
about who racks up that debt,” he said. “Most folks are OK with
deficits just as long as it’s their party that gets the short-term
political advantage of claiming to be saviors shoveling cash. I
don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, the math is the
math.”

Read more at
The Washington Post and
The Hill.

Why the GOP’s Infrastructure Plan Is Smaller Than It Seems

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler
explains that the Republican infrastructure plan
is actually quite a bit smaller than the $568 billion number used
here and in other media reports. That’s because the numbers in the
Republican plan often include existing spending plans.

For example, the $299 billion proposed for roads and bridges
include some $260 billion already in the baseline for the next five
years. “That means the GOP is proposing to spend an additional $39
billion, or 15 percent, on highway funds. That’s the right number
to compare to Biden’s $115 billion,” Kessler explains.

Overall, Kessler says, “it looks like the GOP plan would add
$189 billion to the baseline of current spending, compared to
Biden’s $785 billion for the same line items. … If one does not
include inflation in the highway and transit baselines, then you
could say the GOP is proposing to spend about $242 billion more on
infrastructure. Either way, that would be much less than would be
apparent from the initial news coverage.”


Read the full story at The Washington Post.

Quote of the Day: White House Defends Biden’s Capital Gains Tax
Plan

“This change will only apply to three-tenths of a percent of
taxpayers, which is not the top one percent. It's not even the top
one-half of one percent. We're talking about three-tenths of a
percent. That's about 500,000 households in the country that we're
talking about. So for the other 997 out of 1,000 households in the
country, or the other 150 million households in the country, this
is not a change that will be relevant."

– Brian Deese, director of the National
Economic Council, at a White House press briefing
Monday,
defending President Biden’s proposal to raise the
capital gains tax for those earning more than $1 million a
year.

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