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The Republican Study Committee is pushing a budget that raises the Social Security retirement age to keep the program solvent.
The massive bloc of House Republicans’ fiscal 2025 blueprint also leans into health policy wars, turning Medicare into a “premium support model” and endorsing legislation that would create legal protection for humans at fertilization.
These are well-worn GOP ideas, but President Biden said Thursday the House GOP leadership and many of its members just kicked a hornet’s nest — and should prepare to get stung in November.
“The Republican Study Committee budget shows what Republicans value. This extreme budget will cut Medicare, Social Security and the Affordable Care Act. It endorses a national abortion ban,” Mr. Biden said. “And it will shower giveaways on the wealthy and biggest corporations. Let me be clear: I will stop them.”
The RSC “just proposed yet another budget that would cut Medicare, Social Security and the Affordable Care Act, as well as increase prescription drug, energy and housing costs — all while forcing tax giveaways for the very rich onto the country. Their plan would even raise the Social Security retirement age,” the White House said in a fact sheet.
Ensuring the solvency of prized entitlements is a thorny issue for politicians. The alarm bells are ringing, with Medicare set to go broke by 2028 and Social Security in 2033, triggering a 23% across-the-board cut for seniors.
The RSC, which includes Speaker Mike Johnson and 80% of the House GOP membership, says it’s possible to balance the federal books without upending benefits.
“The federal debt is daunting, but it’s not hopeless. Conservative policies work together across the whole of government to lower spending, lower taxes, decrease the size and scope of the federal government, and spur economic growth,” RSC Chairman Kevin Hern, Oklahoma Republican, said Wednesday after releasing the budget.
His budget would make “modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy,” pointing to Mr. Biden’s decision as a senator in the 1980s to support raising the retirement age from 65 to 67.
“The RSC Budget does not cut or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement,” the blueprint says. “The RSC budget calls on the president to stop lying, stop the political gamesmanship and start seriously engaging with Republicans on sensible reforms to save the program.”
Mr. Biden has made preserving senior benefits a cornerstone of his campaign. He’s used successive State of the Union addresses to accuse Republicans of robbing the entitlement programs while cutting taxes for the rich, and has proposed raising taxes on the wealthiest to fund the programs.
The Democratic incumbent says his November election rival, former President Donald Trump, has been all over the map on entitlements, from telling CNBC in recent days there are “tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do” after accusing his GOP primary rivals, for months, of meddling with the programs.
Plans to tweak Medicare and Social Security appeared to hit the GOP politically in 2022, when Sen. Rick Scott of Florida released a plan that would allow all federal programs to sunset in five years, only to face tremendous blowback and redraft it so that Medicare, Social Security and other benefits were exempted.
In a fact sheet, the White House said Thursday that Mr. Biden “knows the last thing we should do is raid Medicare and Social Security while giving more giant tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations.”
The RSC budget supports turning Medicare into a model in which the traditional plan competes with private plans, and seniors are given subsidies to pick the policies they want. It was a key feature of the 2012 campaign, with vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan shopping the idea while President Barack Obama accused the GOP of ending Medicare “as know it.”
The RSC is defending the plan as a way to avoid across-the-board cuts to Medicare and ensure that “seniors, whether they choose a private plan or the fed plan, receive more affordable, high-quality coverage.”
The budget also leans into pro-life matters by celebrating the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and let states set new limits on abortion. The RSC supports bills that prevent the flow of tax dollars to abortion and endorses the Life at Conception Act, which provides 14th Amendment protection to “all stages of life.”
Whether life begins at fertilization is part of the raging debate around in vitro fertilization.
A recent Alabama Supreme Court decision concluded frozen embryos are people, so their destruction could result in wrongful death lawsuits. The decision sparked a chilling effect in the IVF industry, with some clinics pausing treatments until Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill offering immunity to doctors.
Republicans distanced themselves from the ruling, saying they support IVF as a family-building tool. Yet Mr. Biden is using any threat to IVF or abortion as a political weapon during the campaign.
“Those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America,” the president said at a campaign event in Philadelphia this month. “They found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot in 2022 and 2023, and they’ll find out again in 2024.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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