A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
President Joe Biden’s annual budget outline won’t be released until Thursday, but we already know some of the broad strokes.
He wants to maintain the US as the arsenal of democracy and will pump up the Pentagon budget.
He’s sensitive to the size of the national debt and the unsustainable path of Medicare and Social Security and he’s devised a way to cut budget deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade.
And he’s not going to raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $400,000 per year.
We’ll have to wait for the details to see how exactly he waves his magic budget wand to accomplish these feats. But he gives us a tease in a guest essay for The New York Times opinion section in which he explains that some deficit reduction will come from allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for more drugs, driving prices down and raising the Medicare tax rate on earned and unearned income above $400,000 by 1.2 percentage points.
Checking the White House math – how do they reach that $3 trillion and how long would it really take? – will be key.
What Biden doesn’t say is that Democrats couldn’t get these same ideas passed into law when they controlled all of Capitol Hill last year, before Republicans controlled the House.
Add to that the specter of a potentially economy-wrecking default on the nation’s debt if the sides can’t come together by this summer, which means the stakes of this debate are very high.
What’s going to be more important than Biden’s proposal is how the White House budget gets reconciled with Republicans’ vision, which has not yet been released and has no planned release date.
CNN’s John King effectively summed up Biden’s budget rollout,…
Read the full article here