The GOP has come a long way since the early 2010s, when insurgent fiscal conservatives drove the party to advocate for shrinking the size and scope of government. In recent years, it has presided over significant spending increases, a skyrocketing national debt, and unreformed entitlement spending that is on autopilot and headed fast into a ditch.
At Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address, Republicans even jeered at the suggestion they would try to reform Social Security and Medicare. While a few of the GOP’s presidential candidates support serious entitlement reform, others (most notably Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee) vow not to cut programs. All this reveals not just a flagging political courage among Republicans, but an underlying assumption that voters would reject any such proposal.
This assumption appears to be incorrect.
A recent poll from the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) suggests that leaving Social Security and Medicare untouched has become a political liability for elected officials, as well as a fiscal one for the nation. It found that supermajorities of respondents understand that these programs, sans reform, will go bust within a decade. Nearly 90 percent said policy makers should reform both programs before their reserves run dry in the early 2030s.
Americans are simply recognizing a plain, unavoidable truth. In the short term, Medicare’s trust fund and Social Security’s reserves will likely evaporate by 2031 and 2033, respectively. This will trigger significant mandatory benefits cuts. Congressional inaction constitutes an affirmative choice to scale back benefits, and to do so in a fiscally irresponsible and chaotic way.
Next, consider the long-term effects. Social Security will pay out a projected $21 trillion over its trust fund’s income in the next three decades, during which time Medicare will face a projected $48 trillion deficit. These, together with an estimated $47 trillion in increased interest payments to the national debt, combine to a $116 trillion total shortfall. The two programs make up 95 percent of the federal government’s unfunded liabilities. Next to these figures, recent skirmishes over marginal reductions to discretionary spending appear to be a sideshow.
According to the poll, 90 percent of respondents say they want presidential and congressional candidates to propose fixes to Social Security’s brokenness. Additionally, 82 percent think politicians have dodged the issue. Strong majorities say President Joe Biden (57 percent) and Congress (74 percent) are doing too little to address it. Older voters, on whom the GOP relies, held these positions most strongly, TPA’s poll found. Voters considered “very likely” to vote also held them at a higher rate than average. Respondents responded nearly identically when asked these questions about Medicare.
Respondents largely agreed on means-testing as a prudent reform. A majority looked skeptically on raising the retirement age, however. This presents an opportunity for lawmakers to exercise political leadership and shift public opinion. As Edmund Burke told his constituents in Bristol, the elected official “owes” his voters “not his industry only” but “his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience.” With clear-eyed leadership from elected politicians and the media, voters will likely accept the necessity of incremental reform of the retirement age as well. As TPA’s poll shows, Americans — when faced with the facts — come to reasonable policy conclusions.
In the recently released “Democracy or Republic?,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Jay Cost argues that the framers designed the Constitution primarily to promote consensus. They “believed that the larger, broader, and more considered a majority is in support of an initiative, the more likely the initiative promotes justice and the general welfare,” Cost writes. The constitutionally outlined legislative process naturally stifles and fractures would-be tyrannical factions. Through “an elaborate process of bargaining, negotiating, and politicking,” Cost explains, opposing factions reach a “compromise position they can live with” that “hopefully reflects the consensus view of the nation.”
Considering the alternatives, Americans broadly agree that reform is both necessary and unavoidable. Continued denial and procrastination are what is truly unpalatable. To determine precisely how to reform Social Security and Medicaid — where to cut, and how deep to stick the knife — Congress must bargain, negotiate, and politick. The result likely will not fully satisfy many, particularly many fiscal hawks. It certainly will disappoint strict constitutionalists who favor devolving all welfare programs to the states in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. But such is life and governance in an extended republic.
The elusiveness of perfection does not lessen Congress’s obligation to enact something good, or at least something better than the status quo.
David B. McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.