Sen. Bob Casey and Congressman Lou Barletta
Incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and his challenger, Republican Congressman Lou Barletta, each paint a picture whereby a number of simple steps taken by Congress will spark a new era of American prosperity and economic growth – visions that, to hear them tell it, require diametrically opposed policies.
In their first debate over the weekend, they laid out for Pennsylvania’s voters competing plans for how they’d grow wealth and apportioned blame for what they see as the rival party’s responsibility for the burgeoning federal debt.
“Under President [Barack] Obama’s stimulus and their administration, the national debt went from $10 trillion to over $20 trillion,” Barletta said. “More debt was created during that administration than every president going back to George Washington.”
Casey argued that the Trump administration was taking the budget even further out of whack.
“Deficit and debt have exploded in just the last year or so under this administration,” Casey said. “Part of the driving force behind that explosion is this tax bill that they rammed through. You had a Republican bill, rammed through, that gave 83 percent of the benefits to the top 1 percent. So if you’re making more than $730,000, according to the Tax Policy Center, you’re doing pretty well. You’re getting a huge tax break.”
Barletta said that Casey was fundamentally misunderstanding how the December 2017 tax reform legislation functioned, saying that it had jump-started the economy to such a degree that tax receipts were actually rising despite lower tax rates.
“It just proves that you don’t understand how to get the economy going,” he said. “And I can understand that when you’ve spent a career in Washington. … Ninety percent of the people have seen more money because of the tax cuts. A family of four earning $40,000 – now this is not the rich, this is not one top 1 percent – will see a $1,447 tax cut because of our bill.”
When Barletta conceded that in the short term, the tax cuts had added to the federal budget deficit, Casey pounced to claim that Republicans in Congress were going to use the shortfall as a pretext to cut widely popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.
“They jacked up the debt to give this corporate tax giveaway to the tune of about $2 trillion, that’s with a ‘T,’ in order to pay for that,” Casey said. “Now they’re talking, all of a sudden they’ve discovered that they’ve created a higher deficit. So they’re trying to fill in the gap by cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Two of those, Medicare and Social Security, are earned benefits. They should be there for the American people.”
When Casey said he supported increasing the minimum wage and rolling back the 2017 tax reforms to redirect those tax cuts purely for the middle class, Barletta insisted once again that it showed the senator did not understand what was driving the current period of economic growth.
“I hope everyone’s listening very closely,” Barletta said. “We’re in the middle of the greatest economy that that we’ve ever seen. If we go back to Democrats control, it ends. … You know when wages go up? When there’s a competition for workers. You know why? Because you don’t want your workers to leave. The wages going up next will be the next thing we’re going to see under the Republicans in charge, because now there’s a competition beginning. There’s more jobs today than people who are unemployed. So employers are going to begin to increase wages so that they keep those workers.”
On the topic of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Casey continued to argue that it needed to be defended from Republican efforts to take away essential protections that had been realized when it was enacted.
“The Affordable Care Act provided insurance for the first time for 20 million Americans,” he said. “I want to make sure that every single one of those Americans, including over 1.1 million Pennsylvanians, has health care. But it also did something we don’t talk about enough, it provided a range of protections for people who already had insurance but didn’t have protections with regard to pre-existing conditions, women were charged higher rates, because insurance companies were allowed to do that. In this instance, the worst thing we could be doing is scaling back those protections.”
Barletta insisted, as he has publicly for weeks since Casey made the topic a point of contention in the campaign, that he opposes measures that would do away with protections for those with pre-existing conditions.
“I would not support anything that doesn’t take care of people with pre-existing conditions, regardless of the millions of dollars that have been spent on TV to try to convince people otherwise,” he said. “This debate is not about Obamacare, and what it’s costing people here in the United States. In Pennsylvania alone, our premiums have gone up 114 percent, $718 billion was raided from Medicare to pay for Obamacare [and] $750 million of taxpayer money went to give health care to the illegal aliens.”
