WATCH: Joe Biden Once Boasted About Wanting to Cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans’ Benefits
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty
Joe Biden is the only 2020 Democrat to have supported the Balanced Budget Amendment. In a floor speech from January 1995, a younger Biden chided liberals in his own party over their reluctance to cut federal spending on programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits. Watch that video here:
Today, Biden is a presumed front-runner in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, outpolling his opponents by wide margins among voters over the age of 50—a fact often credited to his association with popular former president Barack Obama. He leads the pack in terms of superdelegate endorsements as well.
But some election watchers have speculated that the former vice president’s 36-year record as a conservative senator could disqualify him in the eyes of voters from the party’s growing left wing, and even harm his chances in a general election—similar to how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dogged by her past. Much has been made, for example, of Biden’s ill-conceived crusade against school integration busing in the ‘70s, his handling of Anita Hill’s testimony, the ‘94 crime bill, which he wrote, and his closeness with the financial services industry.
But in the flurry of headlines, Biden’s support and vote for the 1995 Balanced Budget Amendment has gone largely unnoticed, despite the fact that it put him squarely at odds with the majority of his Democratic colleagues at the time. The Delaware senator was one of just 14 Democrats to back the measure when it reached the Senate.
H.J. Res. 1, the official designation for the Balanced Budget Amendment, was the central part of the GOP’s “contract With America” promise to eliminate the deficit. If adopted, it would have capped federal spending at what government brought in in revenue, providing an easy tool for those looking to cut federal programs.
As Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, told Paste, “balanced budget amendments are about stopping democratic institutions from printing money when we need more money. It’s a catastrophic idea and would cause depressions and worsen them. It is also a good excuse to slash safety net spending.”
Bernie Sanders, another 2020 Democratic front-runner who was then a member of the House of Representatives, spoke out against the measure on these grounds, noting that along with the Balanced Budget Amendment, the GOP was simultaneously requesting a large increase in defense spending. Sanders pointed out that the amendment was a thinly-veiled effort to cut social programs, expressing that the economy was not as strong as was being reported and that the amendment would cripple efforts to “rebuild the physical and human infrastructure.”
“It will mean, in my view, the destruction of the social security system as we know it,” Sanders warned. “It will mean savage cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, in the opportunity of young people to get grants and loans to go to college; it will mean major cutbacks in nutrition programs for hungry children, it will tamper with the unemployment compensation program, as we heard earlier; it will be a disaster for the vast majority of the people in this country.”
Biden, on the other hand, dismissed the concerns, arguing that there was no way of predicting the impacts of the amendment and claiming both sides were blowing the amendment out of proportion.