News Release

Biden’s “Budget-Cutting Dogma Is a Threat to Public Health”

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BRANKO MARCETIC, branko.95.m at gmail.com, @BMarchetich

Marcetic is author of the recently released book Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden. He just wrote two pieces on Biden.

One piece is pegged to the pandemic: “Joe Biden’s Budget-Cutting Dogma Is a Threat to Public Health.”

Marcetic also just wrote a piece documenting Biden’s lies during Sunday’s debate: “Multiple times, Biden charged Sanders ‘still hasn’t told us how he’s going to pay for’ Medicare for All, even though he released a detailed funding plan last month. He misleadingly charged that Sanders had voted against the 2008 auto bailout. He accused Sanders of having ‘nine Super PACs’ and threatened to ‘list them,’ then backed down when challenged to do so. (For the record, one of those supposed ‘Super PACs’ took only six donations over $5,000 in 2019).

“But it was on his own record that Biden was particularly dishonest. Directly and repeatedly asked by Sanders if he had been on the Senate floor calling for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits, Biden repeatedly flat-out lied, saying he hadn’t — a fact easily disproved by the video of Biden doing exactly that in 1995.

“As has been amply documented, Biden has spent his career taking aim at the program: he targeted it in his 1984 spending freeze proposal; he called for raising the retirement age and reducing its cost-of-living increases in 1996; he voted three years in a row for the balanced budget constitutional amendment, which, as Sanders warned at the time, would have imperiled the program; he called again for raising the retirement age in 2007, as well as introducing means-testing to the program; and as Obama’s vice president, he repeatedly rolled over for Republicans in negotiations, offering them significant cuts to Social Security and other vital programs.

“Biden even managed to squeeze one more lie into the exchange. ‘I was not a fan of Bowles-[Simpson],’ Biden said, referring to the commission set up by Biden’s administration to recommend cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, it was Biden who persuaded former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, known since the 1990s as an uber–deficit hawk who wanted to privatize Social Security, to co-chair the commission. Simpson later got in trouble for calling the program ‘a milk cow with 310 million tits.’

“This was only the beginning. ‘I’m talking about a ban on fracking,’ Sanders at one point said. ‘So am I,’ replied Biden. In fact, Biden has never supported a fracking ban, and his campaign helpfully clarified today that he misled viewers last night. Biden changed his position on the Hyde Amendment ‘a while ago,’ he said; in fact, he supported it until the middle of last year, when, under a torrent of criticism, he abruptly flipped, taking two contradictory positions on the measure in the same week. He ‘helped put together’ the Paris climate accord, he claimed. In fact, no Obama officials can remember him being particularly involved in the effort. He again absurdly claimed that his vote for the Iraq War was actually an attempt to stop the war.

“Perhaps Biden’s most outrageous lie was over his bankruptcy bill. Biden claimed that it ‘was passing overwhelmingly and I improved it,’ that he ‘made it clear to the industry, I didn’t like the bill,’ and that he ‘did not support the bill.’ When Sanders said Biden ‘helped write that bankruptcy bill,’ Biden replied, ‘I did not.’

“These are all lies. Biden had been backing the bill since at least 1998, when he first voted with the rest of the Senate to end a filibuster against it, then voted again to pass it.”