On the menu today: First, thanks to everyone who got the advance orders for Dueling Six Demons off to a strong start.
You hear a lot of griping about the alleged “uniparty” — really just relatively rare areas of agreement between Democrats and Republicans — but those gripes rarely address the most consequential, and harmful, areas where the two parties agree. Neither party wants to tackle Social Security, Medicare, or any other entitlement-reform proposal; both parties have convinced themselves that tariffs are the road to prosperity; and, to take an example near and dear to my heart, neither party is all that interested in investigating or discussing the origin of Covid anymore. Meanwhile, for the second time in five days, President Biden falsely claims the inflation rate when he took office was 9 percent. Either he’s lying, or his memory is failing — which one is worse?
Where Our Two Parties Agree — to Be Terrible
Over on the homepage, our Natan Ehrenreich takes on the increasingly nonsensical claims from the likes of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Senator Mike Lee (Utah) that a “uniparty” in Washington blocks the truly desired policies of a majority of the electorate:
Large, irreconcilable differences remain between Republicans and Democrats on such issues as immigration, environmental policy, guns, taxes, religious liberty, the role of the courts, and the politicization of government agencies. That is not to say there are no areas in which both parties are complicit in bad policy. They have both presided over years of ballooning budgets and skyrocketing deficits and have refused to address the entitlement spending at the root of our fiscal crisis.
Sure, there is a de facto uniparty, or policy areas of broad agreement between both the Democrats and the GOP. They just happen to be issues where these lawmakers either agree with the “uniparty,” or don’t see any point in making much of a stink about it. You don’t see Lee or MTG going out and denouncing Trump’s call for additional tariffs. (There was a time, back in 2018, when Lee characterized Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum as a “huge job-killing tax hike on American consumers.”)
Now Trump wants to enact a 60 percent or higher tariff on all goods from China, and if Lee has criticized this proposal, he’s hidden that criticism well.
Lee used to be one of the most impassioned advocates for sweeping reform of entitlements; now, he takes a much more cautious and measured approach, emphasizing, “We have to honor the commitments made to those who have paid into the system for decades and who have relied on the associated benefits.”
Under current law, Social Security benefits get paid out to anyone, regardless of income or net worth. At age 62, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and every other fabulously wealthy American qualifies to start collecting benefits just like everyone else. Warren Buffett’s estimated monthly Social Security check at the start of 2024 is $3,254. (The maximum monthly Social Security benefit, available to those who wait until 70 to retire, is $4,555.)
Some of us alleged right-wing maniacs think these folks will be just fine without a check from the federal government every month, and that maybe one way to make the program a little more solvent is to find some net-worth cutoff — $10 million? $5 million? A million? — and declare that past that threshold, you either get reduced benefits or no benefits.
Yes, reformers, mostly on the Right, want the government to give less money to millionaires and billionaires, and because of this, Democrats call us cruel and heartless. Just about everything the typical low-information voter thinks about politics is wrong.
To convince Americans that Republicans want to cut Social Security, Biden and his team point to Lee’s comments from 2010. The fact that 14 years have passed, and nothing has changed about the Social Security system under both Democratic and Republican presidents and both Democratic and Republican-controlled Congresses, ought to be a signal that Republicans in Congress are extremely unlikely to find the political will to even nibble around the edges of Social Security reform — never mind make sweeping benefit cuts for middle-class Americans.
Forced benefit cuts, however, are indeed around the corner. Earlier this month, we allegedly got “good” news:
Social Security’s trust funds — which cover old age and disability recipients — will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035, instead of last year’s estimate of 2034. Social Security would only be able to pay 83 percent of benefits.
Got that? If you are age 51 or older, you should be sitting up right now. If no reforms are made, in 2035 — eleven years from now! — you will only get 83 percent of what you’re supposed to receive. Right now, about 71 million Americans collect Social Security benefits.
If we do nothing, everybody gets their benefits cut. This should be a giant flashing neon sign in Times Square.
But as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl recently observed:
Biden and Trump have made very clear how they’ll handle Social Security and Medicare trust fund insolvency: 1) Demagogue all reform proposals. 2 Make inevitable a blank check bailout funded by deficits. 3) Run up debt to unsustainable levels. 4) Be long gone when inevitable debt crisis hits. And they’ll get away with it because most voters have convinced themselves that if they pretend that Social Security and Medicare’s $116 trillion (three-decade) shortfall is just a lie perpetrated by mean egghead economists, then that mathematical reality will just fade away.
This is anti-leadership, encouraging people to ignore a worsening problem when time is working against them, and demonizing anyone who dares to put forth any actual solution. It’s like the mayor of Amity Island encouraging people to spend as much time in the water as possible, preferably with open wounds.
Biden is also going to claim Trump wants to “cut” Social Security, based upon the former president’s long serving of verbal gobbledygook on CNBC in March:
JOE KERNEN: There are stark policy differences obviously Mr. President, but one thing that I think that at least the perception is that there’s not a whole lot of difference between what you think we should do with entitlements or non-discretionary spending and what President Biden is proposing. It’s almost a third rail of politics. And we’ve got to what a $33, $34 trillion total debt built up and very little we can do in terms of cutting spending. Discretionary is not going to help. Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120 percent of debt to GDP forever.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50 percent. They say 32 and 33 percent. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50 percent, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy. When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help. [Emphasis added.]
Speaking of the uniparty, back in 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden lamented, “Trump doesn’t get the basics. He thinks his tariffs are being paid by China. Any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs. The cashiers at Target see what’s going on — they know more about economics than Trump.” And then in 2020, Biden pledged to rescind Trump’s tariffs on China:
“Some have said Trump’s stance is a good one to counter China’s influence,” said Garcia-Navarro. “Would you keep the tariffs?”
“No. Hey, look, who said Trump’s idea’s a good one?” said Biden. “Manufacturing has gone into a recession. Agriculture lost billions of dollars that taxpayers had to pay.”
And then Biden got into office, kept almost all of Trump’s tariffs, and continued to expand them.
Now, I’m easily persuaded to accept a policy move if it will stick it to the regime in Beijing. But as the editors of NR note, this is a gesture with so little impact on the Chinese economy it might as well be purely symbolic:
The White House says the tariffs will cover $18 billion worth of goods combined. That’s not nothing, but for perspective, $18 billion is equal to 4 percent of total U.S. imports of goods from China last year. Biden’s claims to be protecting American workers and businesses in general with such actions are hard to take seriously. . . .
China’s $18 trillion economy isn’t going to miss $18 billion, assuming the Biden administration’s estimate is correct, so the claim that these tariffs are somehow striking a major blow to a strategic adversary is laughable. That also means they won’t impose a major cost on U.S. consumers, at least directly. Chinese retaliation could increase the damage down the road.
The policy is in keeping with the Biden administration’s overall approach to China, which has included a lot of tough talk and occasional action but which consistently fails to produce any meaningful consequences for the regime’s wrongdoing.
The real uniparty is schizophrenic in its dealings with China, wanting to look tough but terrified of jeopardizing economic ties that have been built over decades. Similarly, the real uniparty believed, up until February 2022, that it could get Vladimir Putin to see reason.
And finally, the real uniparty has forgotten about investigating the origin of Covid.
ADDENDUM: For the second time in five days, President Biden claimed that inflation “was at 9 percent when I came in, and it’s now down around 3 percent.” As you likely know, it was 1.4 percent in January 2021:
One possibility is that Biden knows this is false, and this is a deliberate effort to mislead the public and get people to associate high inflation with Donald Trump’s presidency and not his own.
Another possibility is that Biden misremembers the inflation rate when he took office, he was informed that his claim was false, and he has since forgotten the correct numbers. Special counsel Robert Hur, among others, contended that Biden’s memory is poor.
Another possibility is that Biden misremembers the inflation rate when he took office, said so publicly, and no one around the president has told him, “Mr. President, when you took office, the inflation rate was just 1.4 percent, you can’t go around claiming that it was 9 percent.” Meaning we have a president who operates in a fog of half-truths and illusory claims that reflect the way he wishes things had happened, and no one around the president sees any point in correcting him.