In Congress, Walz championed tough fiscal medicine

Daniel Hillburn, Tribune News Service

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz once signaled support for a controversial deficit reduction plan that would have cut entitlement programs and raised taxes across the board, a review of Walz’s record as a House lawmaker shows. The Minnesota governor, who served in the House from 2007 through 2018, during those years often touted his commitment to fiscal discipline. He backed the 2010 recommendations of a bipartisan panel panned by critics on the left as the “Catfood Commission” — ostensibly because its $4 trillion worth of deficit-reducing plans would leave the poor and elderly to subsist on cat food. Led by former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., and former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff Erskine Bowles, the commission proposed gradually raising the Social Security retirement age and curbing Medicare and Medicaid payments, federal pensions, defense spending and more. It included a broad-based tax overhaul that would have lowered tax rates but eliminated enough deductions and credits to result in households of all incomes paying more, though the richest would have been hit hardest.

Walz initially supported President Barack Obama’s executive order establishing the commission, and later voted to call on Obama to submit a budget request based on its eventual recommendations. In a February 2010 constituent mailer, Walz wrote that he had pushed Obama to “move quickly” to create the commission, and that he’d called on then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to bring its recommendations to a floor vote. “That may not be a popular idea, but it is necessary to set partisanship aside and bring our debt down,” Walz said. In April 2010, he sent his constituents a pamphlet entitled “Standing up for Fiscal Responsibility in Washington,” again touting his support for the deficit commission.

He followed up the next month with another deficit-themed mailer: “Reducing the deficit and paying down the debt will require Congress to make some tough decisions. But Congressman Tim Walz believes anything can be accomplished if it is important enough,” Walz’s office wrote. “Tackling the national debt is that important.” To underscore the point, Walz was also one of a handful of members to donate a portion of his congressional salary to the U.S. Treasury for debt reduction each quarter. He gifted over $91,000 from his salary during his House career, according to disbursement records.

The Simpson-Bowles commission’s plan initially met fierce bipartisan opposition. In a press release, Pelosi called its co-chairs’ November 2010 draft proposal “simply unacceptable,” and said a deficit-reduction plan “must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social security and Medicare.” The final plan released weeks later altered the mix of spending cuts somewhat but it maintained the core of the initial proposal. Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, one of three congressional Democrats on the commission to vote against the plan, criticized its proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security. “To say that we’re going to reduce our deficit and our debt by asking Medicare beneficiaries to pay more for their health care, I think is absolutely unconscionable,” she said during a commission meeting.

Former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., who served on the commission, said at the time that he voted against the plan to because it “relies too heavily on tax increases,” and did not sufficiently address rising federal health care costs. The commission ultimately failed to muster the supermajority required to send its recommendations to Congress for approval. Neither chamber voted directly on the commission’s plan, though several measures inspired by the plan were considered. In August 2011, Walz voted for a debt-limit package that the Congressional Budget Office said would reduce deficits by $2.1 trillion over 10 years if implemented in full. Of that total, the law established a bipartisan House-Senate “supercommittee” to develop a plan to cut $1.2 trillion; if they could not agree, across-the-board cuts would be applied in what’s known as a “sequester.”

Later, in November 2011, Walz signed onto a bipartisan letter to the supercommittee co-chairs, former Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., calling for the panel to target a more ambitious $4 trillion in deficit reduction. “To succeed, all options for mandatory and discretionary spending and revenues must be on the table,” the letter said. Walz pointed out these actions in an April 2012 constituent mailer pointing out the need for “real steps, built on smart spending cuts, ending wasteful spending and closing tax loopholes.”

The supercommittee ultimately failed to reach agreement. In a Nov. 21, 2011 statement, Hensarling and Murray said “we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.” The automatic sequester cuts eventually triggered in early 2013, but Congress later whittled them down in a series of budget deals. In 2013, Walz voted to support an amendment that would have called on Obama to submit a balanced budget based on the Simpson-Bowles commission’s recommendations. The amendment was rejected on the floor by a vote of 75-348, with just 54 Democrats and 21 Republicans voting for its adoption.

Despite signaling support for sweeping deficit reforms and painful spending cuts, Walz’s record shifted during his tenure in the House. During floor consideration of House Republicans’ fiscal 2013 budget resolution in March 2012, Walz voted against a bipartisan amendment that aimed to replace the text with an alternative budget modeled on the Simpson-Bowles commission’s recommendations.

Its sponsor, former “Blue Dog” Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, described the amendment in a floor speech as “the budget that is endorsed by Simpson and Bowles,” though its opponents said the amendment relied more on spending cuts than the commission’s original plan. The amendment was overwhelmingly rejected 38-382. In 2017, Walz reversed his position that all options should be on the table for deficit reduction. According to the House Rules Committee website, Walz co-sponsored an amendment to Republicans’ fiscal 2017 budget resolution, submitted by Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan, that aimed to block House or Senate consideration of any measure that would reduce Social Security or Medicare benefits. The amendment was not made in order by the Rules Committee.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign hasn’t released a clear outline of how a Harris-Walz administration would approach the deficit. But the 2024 Democratic platform adopted at the party’s convention in August indicates that a Harris administration would aim to pay for federal programs by levying new taxes on the wealthy while keeping cuts to entitlement programs off the table. Bob Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that encourages fiscal responsibility, said that type of approach wouldn’t be enough to meaningfully fix the deficit.