The former vice president has backed Social Security cuts in the past, but now supports a plan that would increase them.
In a matter of a few hours on Tuesday evening, former Vice President Joe Biden released a digital video advertisement accusing Sen. Bernie Sanders , a Democratic presidential rival, of lying about Biden’s support for Social Security cuts, and Sanders shot back with a video using Biden’s own words from 1995 indicating support for benefit cuts.
In the spot, Biden focused on debunking a very narrow element of the criticism of his record: That in an April 2018 speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Biden had backed then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s vision for Social Security. The ad cited a New York Times column by economist Paul Krugman arguing that Sanders had “flat-out lied” about what Biden said.
“When I argued if we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,” the ad quotes Biden as saying. “I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single, solitary thing in the government.” The Sanders campaign had been trying to lure Biden into a one-on-one slugfest over Social Security for weeks, telegraphing as much ahead of the debate in Des Moines, Iowa, last Wednesday, only to come up empty-handed when the moderators declined to bring it up.
But as Tuesday evening’s clash affirmed, Biden, an avatar of the business-friendly “New Democrats” in the 1980s and ’90s, has a long history of flirting with, endorsing ― and at times actively pushing for ― benefit cuts. Rather than embrace privatization, Biden, like other Democrats in the post-Reagan era seeking to upend the stereotype of the “tax-and-spend liberal,” held onto the idea that entertaining Social Security and Medicare cuts was a mark of fiscal seriousness.
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