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WASHINGTON, March 7 (AP) With an eye toward 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden will present his election-year budget plan this week in the must-win state of Pennsylvania, rather than unveiling the usual White House.
Biden’s trip to Philadelphia on Thursday suggested that the president’s budget proposal will be a form of political messaging, not just the government’s fiscal outline for the next fiscal year.
The White House budget plan will be a “what-if” document designed to tell voters what the federal government could do if Democrats firmly control the White House and Congress. Currently, the Republican majority in the House opposes most of Biden’s ideas.
The president hinted in a speech on Monday that higher taxes on the wealthy would be at the center of his budget plan, announcing that one of the provisions would target billionaires.
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Speaking to a group of firefighters as a representative of everyday working Americans, he said: “A lot of what we’re doing is about your right to be treated with fairness, dignity and respect.”
“Part of that is creating a fair tax system. If we start getting people to pay their fair share, we can make all these improvements and still cut the deficit,” he said in a speech to the International Association of Firefighters.
Democrats and Republicans are now scrambling to show the public which party is the most fiscally responsible. It’s a key test because the White House and Congress need to agree this summer to boost the government’s borrowing authority, or the U.S. could default and plunge the economy into a deep recession.
Biden laid the groundwork for the upcoming budget in last month’s State of the Union address and other recent speeches. He has pledged to cut deficits totaling $2 trillion over 10 years, strengthen Social Security and Medicare, and limit tax increases for those earning more than $400,000.
His plan is in some respects far more ambitious than what he proposed in 2021, when his budget would reduce debt by $1 trillion over 10 years (relative to expectations).
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called for putting the state on a path to a balanced budget while keeping Social Security and Medicare intact. But McCarthy has kept a poker face on how the GOP is doing it. House Republicans have struggled to rally behind their own budget proposals and are unlikely to release a blueprint unless they pass with a 218-vote majority.
Instead, congressional Republicans will emphasize the tax increases that Biden will outline in his budget proposal, betting their arguments will sway voters at a time when inflation continues to hit consumer pockets. That’s according to Republican aides who insisted on anonymity to discuss their strategy.
Particularly helpful to Republicans, they said, was Biden’s blunt statement last week that “I’m going to raise some taxes.”
Pennsylvania is a rigorous test of two competing ideological visions of the country. Biden won the state by about a percentage point in 2020, a decidedly narrow victory. His trip on Thursday will be his 23rd as president.
In the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race, Democrat John Fetterman won by about 5 percentage points despite voter concerns about the U.S. economy being tied to high inflation.
White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said Pennsylvania was “very close to Biden’s heart” and that the Scranton-born president considered it his “second home” after Delaware. He served as a U.S. Senator there.
As Biden visited Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Jean-Pierre said, “This is an opportunity for the president to speak directly to the American people.”
Beyond taxes, Republican lawmakers have also taken aim at the White House’s pledge to cut the deficit further, pointing to the massive spending measures passed by Democrats in the first two years of Biden’s presidency. In particular, Republican senators plan to make the case that, given the government’s revenues are already so high, Democrats should cut or reduce programs rather than raise taxes to pay for more, one Republican aide said.
Jim Carter, director of the conservative America First Policy Institute, said Congress typically ignores the presidential budget and he expected Biden’s plan to be more of a “free information document.”
“The federal government doesn’t have a revenue problem,” Carter said. “It has a spending problem, and Joe Biden’s budget won’t do anything to curb it.”
House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, last month laid out a list of more than $750 billion in possible spending cuts. Topping the list is repealing Biden’s executive order to provide partial student debt relief, which would restore about $400 billion to federal coffers.
Arrington also included removing funding related to what he called a “wake-up” agenda, as the GOP’s cultural message has merged with the economy. He would withhold $60 billion from the EPA for environmental justice programs and get back $3.6 million to extend the Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office director Philip Swagel issued guidance on Monday saying the projected deficit would need to be cut by $5 trillion over the next decade to match the 50-year historical average.
“Returning the primary deficit to historical averages is not the CBO’s proposal,” Swagel wrote as a warning.
As Swagel outlines, the political trade-offs are obvious. Some $670 billion to $1.2 trillion could be raised by removing restrictions on the payroll tax that funds Social Security. But it would raise taxes. Republicans oppose the tax hike, which would also violate Democrat Joe Biden’s pledge to raise taxes only on those earning more than $400,000.
The last Pennsylvania link. Standing on the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia last September, Biden warned former President Donald Trump and his Republican followers were “a threat to this country.” Trump’s defeat in 2020 led to his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an event vividly remembered in the American consciousness. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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