By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – January 19, 2023

After winning the Iowa caucuses Monday, Mr. Trump replayed a golden oldie of a campaign pledge: “We’re also going to pay off the national debt. It’s about time.” He said the same thing in 2016, before he added about $8 trillion to the tab. Roughly half of that was Covid relief, so perhaps voters grade him on a curve. Less forgivable is that he’s now playing for the Democrats on entitlements.

“Americans were promised a secure retirement. Nikki Haley’s plan ends that,” says the grim narrator of a Trump advertisement playing in New Hampshire. A new radio spot adds: “Year after year, you paid into Social Security. Now Nikki Haley wants to keep you from collecting what’s yours.” The Trump campaign alleges Ms. Haley would cut benefits “for 82 percent of Americans.”

This is dishonest. Social Security is running out of money, and doing nothing will result in a 23% cut to benefits within a decade. The retirement trust fund, according to the latest report, will be depleted in 2033, at which point the incoming cash “will be sufficient to pay 77 percent of scheduled benefits.” Does Mr. Trump have any plan to prevent this outcome in only nine years? Nope.

Ms. Haley hasn’t issued a detailed proposal, but what she says doesn’t fit Mr. Trump’s narrative. “I will protect those receiving Social Security and Medicare—that’s a promise,” she said last fall. “We’ll keep these programs the same for anyone who’s in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or older, period.”

Then she added that she would “limit benefits on the wealthy” and “raise the retirement age only for younger people who are just entering the system. Americans are living 15 years longer than they were in the ’30s. If we don’t get out of this 20th-century mindset, Social Security and Medicare won’t survive.”

Whatever Mr. Trump might say about getting the debt under control, it won’t happen without changes to these programs. Social Security was 19% of total federal outlays in 2022. Medicare was 12% and Medicaid 9%. The category of “other means tested entitlements” was another 10%. Add those up, and they’re half of federal spending. As social programs keep growing, they crowd out everything that’s counted as “discretionary,” including national defense, which was 12%.

This problem will get worse. By the year 2053, Social Security outlays will climb to 6.2% of GDP from 4.8%, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Medicare will go to 5.5% from 2.8%. “Rising health care costs per person and the aging of the population are the main reasons for the sharp increase in projected spending on the major health care programs,” CBO dryly notes. Ditto for Social Security.

Republicans used to grasp this reality, and Democrats hammered them as heartless while pretending not to understand math. Recall the Medicare attack ad in which a doppelgänger of Rep. Paul Ryan pushed a grandma in a wheelchair off a cliff.

Today the putative leader of the Republican Party is taking the same line against Ms. Haley. She’s the one candidate in 2024 who is honest about what’s driving the debt, and Mr. Trump is trashing her for it. Ron DeSantis has switched jerseys on this issue as well. He has been arguing that because life expectancy has dipped slightly amid Covid and the opioid epidemic, the U.S. can’t possibly adjust Social Security to account for the enormous gains in health and longevity since the 1930s.

It’s dizzying. House Republicans are at one another’s throats over modest bills to keep the government running, and some of the rabble rousers are now debating whether to knife their second Speaker in three months. Yet Mr. Trump is running a presidential campaign all but promising America a future as a broke, weak welfare state, and none of the MAGA debt agonists object. Incoherence, thy name is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

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Source: Trump Isn’t Serious About the National Debt – WSJ