Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer via AP
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg holds a town hall meeting at Keene State College, in Keene, New Hampshire, February 8, 2020.
Coming off what some might argue was a win in Iowa, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg now finds himself the leader of the centrist Democratic cohort heading into Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire. Accordingly, over the weekend, Buttigieg hit the town hall circuit with a new economic vision that aligns with his Big Centrist energy. Asked by an attendee at a Keene, New Hampshire, town hall to give his thoughts on “the deficit,” Buttigieg articulated a willingness to embrace fiscal hawkery that’s been notably absent from the Democratic primary.
“I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable talking about the deficit,” Buttigieg answered. “Because right now we got a president who comes from a party that used to talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, with a trillion-dollar deficit, and no plan in sight for what to do about it … This should concern progressives, who are not in the habit of talking or worrying too much about the debt.” He then went on to claim that a ballooning deficit would in fact prevent investment in “safety net and health and infrastructure and education programs,” intimating that deficit reduction would need to supersede the progressive policy agenda.
That should alarm Democrats all over the political spectrum. Buttigieg’s sudden pivot to deficit-hawk politics is deeply misguided and evinces a profound misunderstanding of recent political and economic history. Virtually all of the party’s disparate factions understand that there simply isn’t a deficit problem worth obsessing over at this time, and making such noises only serves to restrict progressive ambitions. That Buttigieg is taking his cues from the worst minds in politics when it comes to the federal budget only heightens his wrongheadedness.
The deficit has indeed risen dramatically under President Donald Trump, as it did under George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, all of whom enacted tax cuts and boosted defense spending, guided by Dick Cheney’s famous proclamation that deficits don’t matter. But cutting the deficit has not been a focus of the 2020 Democratic field, which has been committed to expanding social services, including education, retirement, and health care.
Indeed, the legitimacy of austerity politics seemed to have been driven out of the political arena with Paul Ryan, after he quickly capitulated and championed the deficit-exploding Trump tax bill. In fact, it’s hard to think of a school of political thought with less credibility and less popularity than deficit hawkery, which was openly forsaken by even its most fervid apostles in the Republican Party once it came up against an opportunity to deposit an extra buck of would-be tax revenue into the pockets of wealthy GOP donors. What’s become clear is that “fiscal responsibility” is a tool only used when Democrats occupy the White House, to prevent popular programs from coming into being.
Buttigieg may be new to national politics, but he should know this well. And though he has spent the last several months walking back his commitment to expanding social services—not long ago, he was a proponent of Medicare for All—his embrace of deficit reduction was not an entirely out-of-the-blue provocation just to rile up flinty-eyed New Englanders. In numerous fundraisers, Buttigieg has teased this same wink-nod suggestion, saying that his understanding of the importance of balanced budgets, which are “unpopular,” shows his daring political ambitions.
To defend those austerity politics that even the Trump-era GOP has largely shied away from, the Buttigieg camp has elevated studies put forth by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a think tank of choice for New Democrat and Democratic Leadership Council types, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), part of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s anti-deficit hydra. Peterson, who died in 2018, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to further his mission to roll back the earned benefits of millions of Americans through cutting Social Security and Medicare. PPI and CRFB’s policy prescriptions reflect this wish.
PPI has lambasted Bernie Sanders for his Medicare for All proposal, claiming it leaves a $25 trillion shortfall, and praised Buttigieg for being the only candidate with more deficit-reducing offsets than new spending proposals. (For what it’s worth, Buttigieg’s health care vision would be more costly than Sanders’s in terms of overall national health expenditures, proving further that this is an ideological mission above all.) CRFB, meanwhile, has pivoted between praising Trump’s proposed cuts to Social Security and lamenting that they aren’t bigger.
Both groups have advanced a deficit scaremongering approach that has consistently failed the burden of proof. We’re running a real-time experiment about the dangers of runaway deficits, but despite the best apocalypse-predicting efforts, interest rates haven’t soared and inflation hasn’t spiraled. CRFB and PPI are part of the crowd who have predicted dire outcomes from deficits for a decade, and they have spent a decade being incorrect. There was no natural rate of unemployment, no government “crowding out” private spending, and no inflationary spiral. They were completely, utterly mistaken. Somehow these are Buttigieg’s go-to fiscal policy shops.
We’re running a real-time experiment about the dangers of runaway deficits, but despite the best apocalypse-predicting efforts, interest rates haven’t soared and inflation hasn’t spiraled.
Perhaps the reason that deficit hawkery is unpopular is not because of a lack of political derring-do, as Buttigieg says, but because it’s flat-out wrong. And if it’s bad economics, it’s even worse political messaging, especially in the run-up to the general election against a Trump administration that has already spent twice as much public money on farm bailouts as Obama spent to save the auto industry. Obama’s too-soon pivot to deficit reduction stunted the recovery and may have contributed to Trump’s rise; that any Democrat would want to rerun that playbook beggars belief.
It marks a staggering heel-turn from a candidate who just coincidentally happens to be raising a boatload of money from Wall Street and the billionaire class, which just coincidentally happens to find deficit hawkery a perfectly persuasive line of political thinking. That’s to say nothing of its open intergenerational unfairness, which calls for the already pauperized millennial generation to now pay for the benefits of the boomers despite being saddled with historic levels of debt and not owning any real wealth or assets. It bespeaks a profound generational divide, and helps explain why Buttigieg has done so poorly with his own demographic: No self-respecting millennial would parrot this patently unfair line of argument. Indeed, the Peterson-funded youth-tailored deficit-hawk group The Can Kicks Back was one of the all-time political failures of the 2010s.
Could a pro-austerity agenda outflank Republicans in 2020? It certainly wouldn’t offend Mitch McConnell, who recently reiterated his long-standing ardor for cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, even suggesting he would set aside his undying opposition to bipartisanship to do it.
But Buttigieg isn’t the only one mounting an incipient campaign to bring back hawkery. On Monday, the Trump administration released a budget proposal with massive cuts to the social safety net, after blowing a multitrillion-dollar hole in the deficit for his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Trump’s budget includes a $920 billion Medicaid cut, a $756 billion Medicare cut, $24 billion in Social Security cuts, alongside a 26 percent cut to the EPA, the elimination of HUD’s affordable-housing program, and a $181 billion cut to food stamps. This, they say, is the tough but necessary price to pay for eliminating the deficit in 15 years. So Buttigieg, in his advocacy for “balanced budgets” and all they entail, is not alone after all. In a general election that should attack Trump for his heartlessness toward the neediest, Buttigieg would be in the awkward position of agreeing with the president on the need to “tighten our belts.”
Indeed, his newfound embrace of that very same largely discredited right-wing rhetoric Trump is now elevating has sounded alarm bells from progressive groups, who see him as a risk of advancing the next stage of the Republican agenda, one built on equal parts bad faith and bad math. “Senator Mitch McConnell says he wants to work with the next Democratic president on cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, so that the Republican Party isn’t blamed for the cuts. McConnell uses the deficit as a pretext for demanding cuts to earned benefits, even though Social Security (unlike the $2 trillion Republican tax scam) doesn’t add a single penny to the deficit,” said Linda Benesch, communications director of Social Security Works, a progressive political action group. “We need to make sure the Democratic nominee is someone who would never take McConnell’s bait.”
