A Republican Spending Problem – The New York Times

As a congressional Republican prepare for a budget showdown later this year with President Biden, they said they would insist on major cuts in federal spending. So far, though, they’ve left out some pretty important details: what those cuts might be.

Republicans are more willing to talk about what they will not cut. Party leaders have promised not to touch Medicare and Social Security. Republicans generally oppose cuts to military spending and veterans’ benefits. And neither party can do anything about interest payments on the debt the government has accumulated. Combined, these categories account for nearly two-thirds of federal government spending.

The largest remaining category concerns health care spending that benefits middle- and low-income families, including from Medicaid and Obamacare. Far-right Republicans, like some in the Freedom Caucus, signaled they will propose to cut these programs. For their part, party leaders have said they will pay attention to anti-poverty programs like food stamps.

But cuts like these would have a major potential downside for Republicans: Partisan shifts in recent years mean Republican voters now benefit from redistributive programs. This is even more than Democratic voters.

EQUAL Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic recently wrote“The escalating rivalry between the parties over the federal budget is based on a fundamental paradox: A Republican majority in the House is now more likely than Democrats to represent constituencies. older and lower income people who rely on social programs that the GOP wants to cut.

According to researchers at the University of Southern California, nearly 70 percent of Republicans in the House of Representatives represent middle-income counties below the national average. By contrast, about 60 percent of House Democrats represent counties that are wealthier than average.

Class politics, as Brownstein says, have been reversed.

upside down

I have written about the stresses that this reversal created for Democrats. The party increasingly reflects the views of high-income professionals, who tend to be more liberal on social issues than most swing voters. Leftists today are less religious and patriotic than the rest of the country and care less about crime and border security. The left focuses more on differences among Americans, especially by race, gender, and sexuality, than on what Americans have in common.

This shift has been going on for a long time, but it has accelerated over the past decade. “The new left is very identity-conscious,” my colleague Nate Cohn wrote last week. “Obama liberals tended to emphasize similarities between groups and downplay longstanding divisions over race, religion, and partisanship.” (In that article, Nate does a thoughtful attempt to define “wake up.”)

These developments have created challenges for the Democratic Party. It has continued to lose working-class white voters and has recently lost some Latino And Asian Americans voters. Biden and his aides have spent considerable time thinking about these issues, and he has attempted to take a less elitist approach. Democrats don’t “pay as much attention to working-class people as we used to,” did he say?.

But new class dynamics also create challenges for the Republican Party. For decades, this very party has skewed wealth. It still has to manage the difference between higher-income voters and Protestant voters, but Republicans are mostly comfortable pushing for lower taxes and smaller government (aside from the military). ). Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, express this point of view.

Donald Trump was able to engineer a hostile takeover of the party in 2016 in part because he realized that many Republican voters weren’t interested in Ryan-style Social Security and Medicare cuts. Trump promised to defend those programs, and unlike most Republican politicians, he is critical of the trade deals. These positions helped him win the nomination, and then the general election, as Substack’s Matthew Yglesias. argued. During the 2024 Republican presidential campaign, Trump used a similar strategy.

When Trump was president, however, he hardly ruled as a populist. He acted like a President Paul Ryan might have, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy while trying to shrink Medicaid and repeal Obamacare. Those Trump policies are not popular. They contributed to the Republican Party’s heavy losses in the 2018 midterm elections and perhaps also hurt Trump’s re-election campaign.

Polls show that even many Republican voters oppose cuts to government health care programs. The same message is evident in the results of state ballot initiatives: Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah all voted to expand Medicaid.

The GOP . Dilemma

Republicans have yet to find a solution to this problem. If the party were guided solely by public opinion, it could present an agenda in favor of the Democrats on social issues while also calling for higher taxes on the rich. Bryan Bennett, who oversees voting at the Hub Project, a progressive group, told The Atlantic: “There are quite a few economic populists eager to raise taxes on the wealthy and the corporations. union even among Republicans.

But the Republican Party retains enough of its rich base to remain staunchly opposed to raising taxes. Instead, Republicans say the solution to the budget deficit involves less spending. But the specific cuts they’ve talked about so far — like calls for reduced Medicaid and food stamps — don’t come close to balancing the budget. Other Republicans have talked about reducing the “wake-up bureaucracy,” but it’s unclear what that would entail.

“Mathematics doesn’t really work,” says my colleague Catie Edmondson, who is in charge of Congress. “This is a dilemma for Republicans.”

Adding to the challenge for speaker Kevin McCarthy is the slim Republican majority. McCarthy could lose just four votes and still pass the bill without Democratic support. Carl Hulse, The Times’ chief correspondent in Washington, told me, “It’s hard to imagine a Republican budget that can satisfy the Freedom Caucus and still get votes from Republicans in the states. fluctuating county.

What’s next: At some point this summer or fall, the U.S. government is likely to hit its debt limit. To avoid default on debt payments — and the risk of financial crisis — Congress will need to raise the limit before that, and Republicans say they will insist on cuts as part of the deal.

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Art of remake

When video game developers remake games, they must attract both new players and those hoping to relive their favorite games. For horror games, there’s an extra challenge: Can you scare someone twice?

In the new version of 2005’s classic Resident Evil 4, the developers made the zombie enemies faster and smarter, and added elements to surprise even those who already knew the game by heart. origin. The goal is to “create the same feeling as when people were playing these games for the first time,” said Yasuhiro Ampo, the game’s director.

Review: “Newcomers get a chance to understand what all that fuss is about, and the rest of us jump into a time machine,” Patrick Klepek writes at Vice.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

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