The Biden administration is focusing on a specific reelection strategy: using X to announce impractical policy proposals with no intention of implementation, hoping the media won’t question their feasibility.
For example, Vice President Kamala Harris promised $10-a-day daycare despite reports of failures in the Canadian experiment with a similar plan.
President Joe Biden promised to let the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire, effectively resulting in a middle-class tax hike.
This month, Biden claimed he would address the Social Security and Medicare budget shortfalls by taxing the rich. However, this approach is mathematically impossible. The only real solutions involve either raising taxes on everyone or cutting benefits.
Budget expert Brian Riedl has long argued this point. Biden is tapping into the false belief that removing the cap on Social Security taxes would solve the problem, as seen in headlines like CBS News’s headline “One way to fix Social Security? ‘Smash the cap.’”
The cap, currently at about $168,000, means workers stop paying Social Security taxes on earnings above this amount. Removing the cap would increase federal revenues but turn Social Security into a welfare program, still leaving a significant funding gap.
The Social Security Administration estimates that eliminating the cap would leave almost two-thirds of the funding gap unfilled.
Biden is unlikely to introduce a bill to remove the cap because he knows it won’t solve the problem and would rather leave the issue for future generations. This strategy allows him to position his party as populist and Republicans as the party of the rich, relying on populist rhetoric without facing immediate scrutiny.
