The Golden Plan

More than 100 days in and the new Congress has done virtually nothing to resolve the top item on its agenda — avoiding a debt default with some sort of bipartisan budget deal. The partisan posturing and finger-pointing, the absence of any serious debate or negotiation.

So it fell to Rep. Jared Golden, a pro-choice, pro-gun Democrat from a Trump district in the backwoods of Maine, to venture a reasonable plan to tame runaway budget deficits. Neither party would like it, but I think most Americans could accept it. In other words, an artful compromise.

To do that, Golden sets a target of reducing borrowing by $250 billion a year in each of the next two years. Half would come through spending caps such as those floated by Republicans: capping inflation-adjusted “discretionary” spending (everything other than Social Security and Medicare) at last year’s levels, along with rescinding student debt cancellation and recapturing unspent covid funding. The other half would come from raising additional revenue in ways long favored by Democrats: raising the tax rate on big corporations to 25 percent, imposing a surtax on corporate stock buybacks, and rescinding the Trump tax cut for individuals making more than $400,000 a year.

As yet, no colleague from either party has stepped forward to sign on to Golden’s framework. While many will privately acknowledge the fiscal logic of his proposal, and the inevitably of some compromise, they fear that stepping out of party lockstep might cost them the next election. Implicit in that fear is an assumption that most voters are too stupid or uninformed or impatient to listen to reasoned argument.

Golden is a walking refutation of such cynicism. He’s won three times in a solidly Republican district despite lackluster support from party leaders and millions of dollars in out-of-state money pouring in to defeat him. In 2020, he outperformed President Biden by 14 percentage points. And he did it not by pandering to voters or spinning them but by respecting them — and winning their respect in return.

“I get a lot of people say things like, I don’t often agree with you — but I like that you take the time to explain your thought process,’” he told me. In the political and media worlds, he explained, people thrive on conflict and have a simplistic way of thinking about voters. What they overlook, he said, “is that there are a giant number of people out there who would just like a functioning government.”

https://wapo.st/3LAvYkF