OVER THE PAST few weeks,
former Vice President Joe Biden has been making an effort to recast his record
on Social Security as one of a champion who defended the program from assaults,
rather than one who consistently argued that it ought to be cut.
The value of such a revision
is clear: Austerity is no longer a politically viable platform for Democrats to
take in the primary. His defense of his record has included multiple television
interviews, public comments, and even an ad attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders for
“dishonest smears” challenging him on Social Security. In the ad, Biden makes a
sweeping claim: “I’ve been fighting to protect — and expand — Social Security
for my whole career. Any suggestion otherwise is just flat-out wrong.” At
Vice’s Black and Brown Forum in Iowa this week, when pressed on his proposal to
freeze Social Security payments by moderator Antonia Hylton,
he simply lied: “I didn’t propose a freeze.”
In fact, Biden has argued for
cuts or freezes to Social Security throughout much of his career. Earlier in
January, The Intercept wrote
about several instances in which Biden advocated for cutting Social
Security over the course of his career. Biden, when he acknowledges his past
support for cuts, portrays the advocacy as deep in the past. But a close
inspection finds reams of more recent evidence of Biden’s support for cuts —
including in Biden’s recent recounting of a conversation he had with China’s
president, Xi Jinping, and in his choice of Bruce Reed, a longtime deficit
hawk, as a senior policy adviser in his current presidential campaign.
Reed, a longtime Biden aide,
played a central role in advocating cuts to the New Deal-era program as a
co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, as the top staffer for a
controversial commission dedicated to slashing the deficit, and then as Biden’s
chief of staff during the Obama administration. In Washington, D.C., he would
be the last high-level staffer a campaign would bring aboard if it was
genuinely intent on expanding, not cutting, Social Security.
Andrew Bates, a spokesperson
for Biden, said that, as president, Biden would push to expand Social
Security. “As President, Joe Biden would expand Social Security benefits —
paid for with new taxes on the wealthiest Americans. And as Senator Sanders
himself said in 2015: ‘Joe Biden is a man who has devoted his entire life to
public service and to the wellbeing of working families and the middle class,’”
Bates said.
THE CUTS came closest to
happening amid talks between the Obama administration and congressional
Republicans aimed at hammering out a so-called grand bargain. The most
prominent vehicle for those negotiations was known as the Bowles-Simpson
Commission, a bipartisan panel charged with making recommendations to Congress
on how to reduce the federal debt. It was chaired by Alan Simpson, a former
Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, a former Democratic
senator from North Carolina.
And the staff director for
Bowles-Simpson? Bruce Reed. “Our team was led by Bruce Reed, and believe me,
there wouldn’t be a Simpson-Bowles Report without Bruce,” Bowles
later wrote. The chairs of the commission recommended reducing Social
Security benefits for the top half of earners, cutting the amount the benefit
grew relative to inflation and raising the retirement age to 69. Progressives
skewered it, with New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman noting that “it raises the Social
Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen — completely ignoring
the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and
well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the
program most.”
“Simpson-Bowles is terrible,”
he concluded. “Yes, I know, inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become
sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who
told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers.”
The commission failed to
secure the supermajority needed for its recommendations to move on to Congress,
but the administration was far from done try to implement them. After finishing
with the commission, Reed was brought on as Vice President Biden’s chief of staff,
to continue to work on a grand bargain. The Committee for a Responsible Federal
Budget, a Washington group dedicated to cutting Social Security and other
entitlement programs, celebrated the appointment. We can’t think of a better
person for the job,” CRFP said in a statement.
“We hope Bruce will be able to leverage his expertise in this new position, and
that his appointment portends positive steps from policymakers in the Administration
in tackling our rising deficits and debt.”
At the time, the
Fiscal Times wrote, “The recent appointment of Bruce
Reed, the Executive Director of President Obama’s National
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, as Vice President
Biden’s Chief of Staff is the latest signal that the administration plans to
endorse many of the Commission’s recommendations. Since one target for deficit
reduction appears to be Social Security and social insurance programs more
generally, it’s essential to understand the important role that social
insurance plays in the economy.”
National Journal reported that
Reed helped Biden shape his approach to the debt-reduction commission, “often
sitting right behind the vice president in meetings with Republican leaders.”
Reed, National Journal noted, had sided with a cadre of other Obama
administration advisers to “back cuts to Medicare and Social Security despite
pushback from some Democrats who opposed touching entitlements.”
Reed was not some entry-level
staffer. By that point, he had been a top domestic policy adviser in the
Clinton administration, where he had championed the reform of welfare and
otherwise advocated for slashing government spending. He was also co-founder of
the Democratic Leadership Council, which represented the pro-business wing of
the party that rose in the 1980s.
The DLC was the only
influential Democratic institution to lobby not only for cutting Social
Security benefits, but also supported the push for privatization of Social
Security. In the 1990s, DLC began calling for “limited
privatization” of the program that would allow individuals to invest part of their benefits in
the stock market. “Personal accounts would refashion Social Security from a
system of wealth transfer into one that also promotes individual wealth
creation and broader ownership,” the DLC argued,
encouraging the Clinton administration to embrace a grand bargain with
Republicans.
In 1998, a plan to embrace the
grand bargain came close to fruition. In secret negotiations between House
Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas, and President Bill Clinton, a
proposal was hatched to reduce Social Security benefits and embrace partial
privatization in exchange for Gingrich to drop his demand for new tax cuts. That
plan came perilously close to being implemented, but was blown up by Gingrich’s
drive to impeach Clinton rather than cut a deal.
After Reed left the DLC and
joined the debt commission, the organization continued to lobby for cuts to
Social Security and a hike in the retirement age. The DLC submitted comments to
the Bowles-Simpson panel suggesting that Social Security consider an
approach that included “offering ways to mix part-time and online work with
partial Social Security benefits after age 67 and into the eighth decade of
life.”
Reed has remained in Biden’s
inner circle. The campaign paid him more than $35,000 for “policy
consulting” last year. As Politico reported,
Reed routinely travels with Biden, continuing to serve as the former vice
president’s chief policy adviser on the road.
THE NEXT PHASE of the
Obama-era bargain talks, in the wake of Bowles-Simpson, became the so-called
Biden Committee, a series of negotiations over deficit reduction chaired by
Biden, staffed by Reed, and joined by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor; Sen.
Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; and others. Biden, in talks
that were covered closely in Bob Woodward’s book “The Price of Politics,” put
Social Security and other cuts on the table but couldn’t get to a yes because
Republicans refused to agree to any tax cuts. (Fly-on-the-wall books on the
later years of the Obama administration lack the drama of Trump-era tell-alls.)
In the summer of 2011, the
talks evolved into the
Super Committee, made up of six Democrats and six Republicans from the
House and Senate, charged with coming up trillions in budget cuts. Woodward
obtained a copy of the administration’s recommendations to that committee, and
it largely mirrored what was on offer during the Biden Committee talks and
included significant
cuts to Social Security.
But then came Occupy Wall
Street. By the fall, coverage was dominated by protests that began in New York
City around the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” calling attention to vast
wealth inequality and the country’s superrich in a way that hadn’t happened since
the days of the robber barons. The movement spread to cities and towns across
the country, with encampments springing up in downtowns in every region. That
fall, after Bank of America announced a new $5 monthly fee for debit cards, it
faced so much backlash that it backed down and rescinded the fee.
In early November, a group of
protesters set out from New York to Washington, calling themselves Occupy the
Highway and aiming to hit the capital on November 22, the day the Super
Committee was due to issue its legislation, which was designed to glide through
Congress.
On November 21, the Super
Committee collapsed, lacking the votes to get the legislation out of its own
committee. “Super Committee Fail = Occupy Wall Street Win,” celebrated Michael
Glazer, an organizer of Occupy the Highway, in a statement that day. “The
so-called Super Committee was a failure from the beginning. No one has the
courage to stand up inside our corrupt political system and fight for regular
Americans. So, we will continue to take a stand outside the system.”
The willingness of that
faction of protesters to even acknowledge the Super Committee was controversial
inside Occupy, which considered direct interaction with the political system
futile at best and corrupting at worst. But as Glazer emphasized, Occupy had
blown up the committee from the outside by changing the political terrain.
Concerns over the deficit and a preference for austerity were replaced by a
conversation about economic inequality, one that would ultimately boost the
Sanders campaign in 2015 and put an end, for the time being, to Democratic
attempts to cut the deficit by trimming entitlement programs. (It
wasn’t completely dead: An ad Biden released this week includes footage of
Biden telling Paul Ryan, at a vice presidential debate, that he is committed to
protecting Social Security. The Obama administration’s 2013 budget included
Social Security cuts regardless. By 2015, those cuts were out.)
But even while the logic of
the party changed, deficit scolding had become such a firm element of Biden’s
brand that he had a hard time letting go. In 2018, at a speech at the Brookings
Institute, Biden again
returned to Social Security, criticizing then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s
recent tax cut but agreeing with his focus on Social Security and Medicare.
At a speech in July 2018,
Biden again addressed Social Security and Medicare, relaying an anecdote in
which Chinese leader Xi Jinping asked him if China’s investments in U.S. debt
were safe and specifically if the United States planned to do something about
the cost of entitlement programs — Social Security and Medicare — which Xi saw
in conflict with meeting U.S. obligations to China. “I said don’t buy any more
of our T-bills,” Biden whispered,
as he does when he’s letting the audience believe that he’s letting them in on
something secret or saying something verboten.
“‘I hope you’re able to do
something about your entitlement problem,’” Biden said Xi told him. “And I
said, ‘With regard to our entitlement problem, Mr. President, ours is a
political problem, and it’s soluble, but my god, your problem, your one-child
policy has produced a circumstance that by 2022, you’ll have more people
retired than working.’”
It’s a story Biden has
been telling
versions of since 2011, and it has consistently cast entitlements as a
problem to be solved. Biden’s reference to “our entitlement problem” as “a
political problem” that is “soluble” suggests that his view of the programs
hadn’t evolved over the past 40 years, though his official position in his 2020
campaign is the opposite, that benefits should be expanded, not shrunken.
THIS PAST WEEK, Biden
steadily ratcheted up his revision of his record. At Vice News’s Brown and
Black Forum in Iowa on Monday, he was pressed on Social Security. “Do you think
though that it’s fair for voters to question your commitment to Social Security
when in the past you proposed a freeze to it?” he was asked by Vice moderator Hylton.
“No, I didn’t propose a
freeze,” he said.
“You did,” she corrected.
Biden blatantly lied about
Social Security at Iowa's Black & Brown Forum this week:
Q: "Do you think it's fair though for voters to question your commitment
to Social Security when in the past you've proposed a freeze to it?"
Biden: "No, I didn't propose a freeze."
"You did."
On Tuesday, he released an ad
attacking Sanders for what he called “dishonest smears.”
I've been fighting to protect
— and expand — Social Security for my whole career. Any suggestion otherwise is
just flat-out wrong.
The hit prompted a response
from Sanders, who posted a short ad showing Biden boasting of his willingness
to cut Social Security on the Senate floor. The Sanders ad has been viewed some
4 million times, to Biden’s less than a million:
Let’s be honest, Joe. One of
us fought for decades to cut Social Security, and one of us didn’t. But don’t
take it from me. Take it from you.
On Wednesday, Biden joined the
crew at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and was asked about the Social Security flare-up.
“I have 100 percent ratings from the groups that rate Social Security [votes],
those who support Social Security,” Biden said.
The claim was in line with,
but more specific than, his earlier assertion of “I’ve been fighting to protect
— and expand — Social Security for my whole career.”
It’s also not true. A review
of media reports from the 1990s shows that groups dedicated to protecting
Social Security, including the AARP, saw Biden’s votes and advocacy as a
betrayal. Ahead of the critical vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment in 1995,
the Delaware News Journal carried a story that was headlined: “Biden gets
blasted on budget bill: Seniors head list of groups pressing him to
reconsider.”
The story began: “Angry
lobbying groups for senior citizens, children and families, and congressional
watchdogs united Friday to denounce Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. for his support of
the GOP’s balanced budget amendment.”
The article noted that Biden
himself had previously warned that “Seniors are going to pay a big price” thanks
to the amendment. An AARP representative is quoted saying that Biden “can’t
have it both ways” and that the bill “is nothing more than a raid on Social
Security’s trust fund.”
Another News Journal article
from the time reported that the “defections” of Biden and another Democratic
senator “were a serious blow to opponents of the legislation, said David
Certner, an official of the American Association of Retired People, which fears
that the amendment will erode Social Security benefits.”
There were a number of groups
scoring votes on legislation around Social Security at the time — meaning that
they gave ratings to legislators based on their votes — including the NAACP,
Americans for Democratic Action, the National Committee to Preserve Social
Security and Medicare, and the National Council of Senior Citizens. Biden did
not get 100 percent scores from any of those groups because of his votes to
undermine Social Security.
The amendment passed the House
and fell one vote short in the Senate, the Constitution just barely dodging the
bullet. Ultimately, the focus on the measure’s impact on Social Security,
according to the New York Times, swayed enough Democrats to stop it. In the
House, then-Rep. Sanders had zeroed in on the amendment’s effect on Social Security.
“The balanced budget amendment will be a disaster for working people, for
elderly people, for low-income people,” he
said on the House floor. “It will mean, in my view, the destruction of
the Social Security system as we know it.”
Sanders was asked on Friday if
he would apologize to Biden for criticizing him on Social Security, as he had apologized for
a surrogate’s op-ed that argued Biden had a corruption problem. “No,” Sanders
said. “There are ways to raise money in order to protect the working
families of this country. Cutting Social Security ain’t one of ’em.”
