What Biden could still accomplish if he doesn’t run again

President Biden seems to think he’s done such a good job in office, so far, that the nation would benefit if he ran for reelection, and won.

But Biden would also do America a service if he decided not to run for reelection. As a one-term president with no further political ambition, Biden would have the freedom to tell voters the truth about Social Security, Medicare and other crucial matters that most politicians dodge. These problems, involving vast mismatches between spending and benefits, will eventually shackle the US economy if nobody in Washington heads them off.

Biden has strongly hinted that he plans to run for a second term, even though he’d be 82 years old at the time of the 2024 election, and 86 when he finally left the White House after a second term. But he hasn’t formally announced a decision and some analysts think he may be wavering. Voters don’t especially want Biden to run again, and there’s a solid case for younger leadership in both political parties.

Politicians tend to lose power when they announce plans to leave office, since they have fewer future favors to bestow and focus turns to possible replacements. But they also have newfound freedom when they no longer have to pander for votes. Biden could exploit such freedom to start preparing voters for some painful tradeoffs that are coming.

Here are four places to start:

Social Security and Medicare. Republicans and Democrats are currently trading barbs over these costly but cherished support programs for seniors. Democrats, led by Biden, charge Republicans with wanting to slash both programs. Republicans say they plan no such thing, while bemoaning the large and growing portion of federal spending Social Security and Medicare account for.

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What no politician will say is that benefit cuts to both programs are inevitable. So are higher taxes to cover the growing costs. Within 5 to 10 years, both programs are likely to run short of money, with benefit cuts of about 25% if nobody does anything. Biden wants to address the problem by raising taxes on the wealthy, but Democrats could barely raise taxes when they controlled both houses of Congress during Biden’s first two years as president. Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives, are dead-set against tax hikes, especially without other changes. And there’s no prospect any time soon of Democrats gaining 60 Senate seats, enough to overcome the arcane filibuster and topple Republican resistance.

The reality is that both Social Security and Medicare have endured decades of mission creep without needed reforms to adjust for higher life expectancy, exploding medical costs and other changes. They’re both salvageable. But eligibility ages will have to rise. Benefits will phase out for wealthier Americans. Payments to doctors and other care providers will decline, which might require deep reforms to the entire health care system. And taxes will go up. There will be fierce political resistance to every change. But you gotta start somewhere.

Deficit spending. If you think the national debt is bad now, just wait a few fiscal years. The national debt is due to explode from $31 trillion now to $51 trillion in just a decade. We’ve already been able to run up more debt than economists thought possible just 10 or 20 years ago, but it can’t go on indefinitely. One reason is interest costs, which are likely to soar because of higher interest rates. Interest payments on existing debt are likely to hit $1.4 trillion per year in 2033, which would likely be more than total spending on defense. By 2050 or so, interest payments will be the biggest spending category of all, totaling more than Social Security or Medicare.

Biden’s mantra for the next two years of his presidency is “finish the job.” But no president’s business will be finished until the nation’s finances become sustainable. There are many ways to do it. What voters need to start hearing, in general, is that government benefits are too generous and taxes are too low.

The expiration of the Trump tax cuts. At the end of 2025, the income tax reductions for individuals that Congress passed in 2017 are due to expire. A curious feature of that law, signed triumphantly by President Trump, is that a corresponding set of tax cuts for businesses is permanent, with no expiration date. So a de facto tax hike for many Americans is coming. Allowing that to happen is politically unlikely. So what’s going to happen?

Republicans who passed the tax cuts in 2017 relied on tested political logic: Once you’ve given voters something, you can never take it back. So they assumed Congress would just extend the tax cuts again in 2025. But the federal budget outlook wasn’t nearly as grim then as it is now, plus the Trump tax cuts made annual deficits worse. What would be more rational is to let the individual tax cuts expire while at the same time restoring business taxes to the higher, pre-Trump levels. If Biden has a better idea, he should say what it is.

The need for fossil fuels. Another inconvenient truth is that regardless of global warming, the U.S. and world economies are going to need oil and natural gas for decades to come. Biden hinted at this in his 2023 State of the Union address, when he said we’re going to need oil “for at least another decade.” It’s way longer than that, according to every plausible energy forecast.

The transition to renewable energy remains essential. The war on fossil fuels, however, risks the premature retirement of energy needed today before there are enough renewables to place it. There are already signs this is happening, with one piece of evidence being unusually high energy costs in some parts of the country.

On this one, Biden would be pushing back against elements of his own Democratic party. He has the credibility to do that, however, especially after championing and signing last year’s huge package of green energy spending. The message would be to stop vilifying oil and gas providers providing the majority of the energy Americans use today and signal that the government won’t try to drive them out of business.

If Biden were to become radically honest, it might make some of his fellow Democrats uncomfortable. Biden would basically be telling voters a lot of things they don’t want to hear, while also fueling the Republican misinformation machine that distorts every Biden utterance. Maybe it would hurt the whole party in upcoming elections. But Biden could also provide some top cover for the generation of Democrats that’s going to get stuck dealing with these problems.

Many voters might even like a truth-teller, if they knew how to recognize one.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman

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