Before State of Union assault on GOP, Biden pushed Social Security sundown, fed spending freezes

As a first-term senator from Delaware, Joe Biden launched a bill which may sunset all federal functions — along with Social Security — every 4 years, a protection goal that he attacked “some Republicans” for all through his State of the Union cope with Tuesday night. 

The legal guidelines Biden put forward throughout the Senate once more in July 1975, when, like now, the U.S. monetary system was in a nosedive, would have terminated “all provisions of  law”  which enable “new budget authority for a period of more than four fiscal years,” the congressional file displays.

The Biden sunset provisions would have utilized to the safety funds, and entitlement functions reminiscent of Social Security and Medicare.

“It requires every program to be looked at freshly at least once every four years. The examination is not just of the increased cost of the program, but of the worthiness of the entire program,” Biden, then 32, said of his fiscal crunch bill in 1975. 

Ironically, in his speech introducing the legal guidelines once more then, Biden — who remaining 12 months pushed by the $739 billion authorities spending bundle deal he known as the Inflation Reduction Act — went on to lament the “staggering” measurement of the federal funds and the “rate that it is increasing.”

The following decade, on a minimum of three separate occasions, then-Sen. Biden would advocate freezing all federal spending.

In 1984, citing the “upward march of interest rates and inflation,” Biden supported a spending freeze. He argued that the American people “are not stupid,” and would assist a freeze as properly. 

Also in 1984, Biden supported an modification equipped by Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) linking an increase throughout the debt prohibit to a freeze on all federal spending.  

“My mother says there is nothing like looking over the precipice to focus one’s attention,” Biden said on the time of the nation’s rising debt obligations. 

When the modification was withdrawn by Tsongas, Biden voted in the direction of elevating the debt ceiling. 

The following 12 months, Biden proposed freezing all federal spending for two years, arguing all through a floor speech that “If the President again submits an outrageous  budget, Congress should give serious consideration to an immediate across-the-board  freeze for the next two years in federal spending and a two-year suspension of tax indexing.”

The historic knowledge was compiled and equipped to The Post by former GOP Capitol HIll aide Chris Jacobs, founding father of Juniper Research Group.

Biden stood by his assist of freezing federal properly into the Nineteen Nineties. 

In 1995, Biden complained on the Senate floor that his 1975 efforts to sunset all federal functions on no account made it out of Congress. 

“When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well, I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government,” he said.

“And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice. I tried it the third time, and I tried it the fourth time,” Biden bragged.

The resurfacing of the 80-year-old president’s decades-long assist for curbing bloated federal functions on Wednesday was mocked by many throughout the GOP who declare that Biden lied all through his State of the Union speech when he said, “Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority … anybody who doubts it, contact my office.”

“I don’t have a bill to sunset Medicare and Social Security, but [Joe Biden] did,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in a tweet Wednesday, sharing the textual content material of Biden’s 1975 proposal. 

“I always wondered why [Joe Biden] was so insistent on lying to attack me. Now we know: he has a guilty conscience. He actually did what he is falsely accusing me of doing,” Scott added in a separate tweet. 

The Florida Republican helps sunsetting all federal legal guidelines sunsets in 5 years. 

“If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” he said in a tweet. 

The Republican National Committee moreover took aim at Biden’s anti-spending earlier.

“Biden’s spent the last year falsely claiming that Republicans are threatening Social Security and Medicare (they aren’t). Biden claims Republicans back a plan to sunset all federal legislation after 5 years (they don’t). Guess who did support such a plan? Joe Biden,” Zach Parkinson, the RNC’s deputy communications director, said in a tweet.