House Republicans undermine Trump with call for $2.7 trillion in Social Security and Medicare cuts

By Brett Arends

This isn't just touching the third rail of American politics. It's throwing your arms around it while soaking wet.

Donald Trump had just about climbed out of the very deep hole he'd dug for himself last week when he went on TV and talked loosely about "cutting" programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Then along came the Republicans in the House of Representatives on Wednesday dragging him right back into it.

In a document that deserves extraordinary credit for chutzpah, if maybe not tact, House Republicans have just proposed a budget that would slash an astonishing $2.7 trillion from combined spending on Social Security and Medicare over the next decade - more than 8% of the total.

This isn't just touching the third rail of American politics. It's throwing your arms around it while soaking wet.

They also talked about raising the U.S. retirement age at some point in the future, the better to reflect rising life expectancy, though they left open the date for making such a change.

Those proposals come from the Republican Study Committee. This is not the official Republican leadership group, but it is not a fringe caucus, either. Its membership includes 178 House Republicans, or more than 80% of the total.

The committee hardly made matters any better in an election year by leaving the details vague.

As we've mentioned here before, talking about "cutting" entitlements - and especially Social Security - is ambiguous. Future retirement benefits per person are expected to rise faster than inflation. Someone can slow that growth - or ice it altogether - and still say they haven't actually "cut" anything.

Read: Think Donald Trump has promised not to change Social Security? Think again.

But if lawmakers aren't clear about what exactly they plan to do, voters may be apt to fear the worst.

Especially if those legislators also talking about making deep tax cuts - namely, extending the 2017 tax cuts indefinitely. Something's got to give.

Read: Trump's Social Security problem isn't his words, it's his math

The document from the Republican committee will raise yet more concerns, especially among seniors and those in middle age, that the GOP is coming for their retirement benefits.

Politicians mess with this topic at their peril. Evidence suggests it was loose talk on this subject that cost the Republicans their "red wave" in the 2022 midterm elections.

Read: Happy with the election results? You can thank this group of voters who stopped the 'red wave.'

The latest proposals are sailing into the wind, too. More Americans than at any time in recent history want to shore up Social Security's finances by raising taxes rather than by curbing the program's growth. According to a recent poll by Gallup, the tax raisers outnumbered the benefit curbers by a full 30 percentage points, or a ratio of two to one: That's 61% for raising taxes, 31% for reining in benefits.

That gap is double what it was when Gallup conducted the poll in 2015 and in 2005, and triple what it was in 2009.

Republican talk about "cuts" to Social Security and Medicare makes you wonder how hard either party wants to win in November. Exhibits 1 and 2 on this topic are the parties' respective presidential nominees, who between them boast public disapproval ratings comfortably in excess of the entire population of the country.

Still, give the members of Republican Study Committee credit. They're not shy about their ideas.

During the Crimean War in the 1850s, a French officer was invited by his moronic British counterpart to watch and admire as a British cavalry brigade charged a Russian position. But the British officer sent the brigade into the wrong valley, where slaughter by Russian field guns awaited. The French officer, bemused that he had been invited to watch this needless massacre, replied drily that the performance was magnificent in its way, but hardly the way to win a war.

You could say the same about the Republican Study Committee.

-Brett Arends

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03-25-24 1331ET

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