‘There can be no better venue’: Joe Biden will roll out his budget, and a political marker, in Philly on Thursday

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will roll out his budget proposal at a Northeast Philadelphia union hall Thursday, and U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle says there’s nowhere more fitting to emphasize the Democratic agenda.

“There can be no better venue for the speech in talking about middle-class economics than a union hall in Northeast Philadelphia,” said Boyle, a Philadelphia Democrat and his party’s top member on the House Budget Committee.

Biden’s plan is almost certainly dead-on-arrival in Congress. Republicans who control the House have blasted its proposed tax increases on wealthy individuals and are hoping to force the president into steep spending cuts affecting a huge swath of government services.

But the plan, which is also expected to include steep deficit reduction targets, will still serve as a political marker in a key swing state ahead of a likely Biden reelection bid in 2024 and, more immediately, a looming showdown over the country’s borrowing limit, set to reach a boiling point in the coming months.

“That is the big fight of 2023,” Boyle said, “and so this budget proposal fits within that framework of a clean increase in the debt ceiling — it’s about paying the bills that we’ve already run up, not future spending — and No. 2, protecting this economy from those who would attempt to wreck it.”

Republicans have countered that spending must be contained, and plan to roll out their own budget in April.

“It is dire the position that we are today,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) told CNBC this week, arguing that expenditures “will break America.”

“Every great society collapses when they overextend themselves. And this is why it’s so critical,” he said.

Budget roll-outs are typically done at the White House. But in coming Thursday to the Finishing Trades Institute in Northeast Philadelphia, a site for training painters, drywall finishers, glaziers, and others, Biden has chosen a venue and a state with deep personal and political significance. Labor support, Pennsylvania, and Philly will all be critical to his chances if he runs for reelection, as is widely expected.

“We are literally the biggest battleground state in the nation. We will again be the biggest battleground state in 2024,” said Boyle, who has lobbied Biden to visit his district again ever since a campaign stop days before the 2020 presidential election.

Biden has visited Philadelphia for many moments, big and small, in his presidency, including recent events at Independence Hall to warn of threats from “MAGA Republicans” and a stop last month to emphasize his infrastructure bill.

He has spent months portraying himself as the protector of Medicare and Social Security while warning that the programs — currently on an unsustainable long-term fiscal trajectory as the country ages — would be at risk under Republicans. Boyle said many of the themes Thursday will echo Biden’s recent State of the Union speech.

“The president wants to lay out in a transparent way to the American people how he sees us moving forward,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday.

The president plans to pitch tax increases on people earning more than $400,000 and on stock buybacks as part of a series of his plan to extend Medicare’s solvency by a quarter-century. He also plans to propose a series of steps to cut federal budget deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade, in a nod to worries about national debt.

Jean-Pierre said the budget would follow through on Biden’s campaign promises to build the economy “from the bottom up and middle out” while making wealthy people and businesses “pay their fair share.”

Republican leaders have recently vowed to leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, distancing themselves from past plans and individual lawmakers who have suggested cuts to the popular programs for retirees and people 65 and older in order to extend their solvency.

With those vast pieces of the federal budget off limits, and the GOP unwilling to contemplate tax increases, Republicans are instead crafting plans to cut $150 billion from a wide range of non-defense programs, including foreign aid and spending on health care, food assistance, and housing programs for poor Americans. They’ve also called for holding spending increases to 1% per year for the next decade.

Boyle, pointing to a recent analysis from Moody’s Analytics, said spending cuts on the level Republicans are eyeing could cost more than 2 million jobs and spark a recession next year.

“A big part of this year is really going to be defending the [economic] gains of the last couple years,” Boyle said, accusing Republicans of ignoring deficit concerns when they held the White House, and reversing course once Biden was elected.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected a federal budget deficit of $1.4 trillion this year, with average annual deficits of $2 trillion in the coming decade.