According to Raw Story, they’ll “make cuts to Social Security and Medicare. McCarthy also announced that there won’t be any support for funding to help Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion. He has also stated that the GOP intends to fight to raise the debt ceiling, which would shut down the government.” Read story here.
Catherine Rampell, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Princeton and Washington Post columnist (profile here), points out that Republicans haven’t even said how they would tame inflation or deal with a recession.
But we can guess, because their ideas don’t evolve, and their economic policies never change: Cut spending (except on things they want), cut taxes (for the rich), balance the budget (which isn’t how you bail the economy out of a recession), and eliminate business regulations (which is how we got the 1980s savings and loan crisis and the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis).
Republicans have hated Social Security since it was enacted in 1936, and Medicare since it was enacted in 1965. These programs are too popular to eliminate entirely, so they’ve made flank attacks on them. In the 2000s, President George W. Bush and House speaker Paul Ryan tried to privatize Social Security, but the American people wouldn’t have it. In 2011, Republicans floated a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget; read why that’s a bad idea here, here, and here.
For some strange reason, many voters still trust the GOP on economic matters, despite a track record of failures and disasters. Granted, the economy is huge and complicated, and its vast workings are hard to understand, but it’s not hard to see the past results.
And it’s not hard to ask, “How are you going to solve inflation, how will you prevent a recession,” and if all you get is silence, conclude you’re being asked for a blank check. What you’ll get is policies that help the rich and hurt workers and consumers. It’s actually no more complicated than that.
Related story: A Bloomberg article says Republicans want to use the debt limit as leverage to get changes to Social Security and Medicare (read that story here).