Why Pete Buttigieg Is Talking About the Deficit in New Hampshire

Pete Buttigieg

Mary Altaffer / Associated Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Saturday at a town hall in Keene, New Hampshire, Rep. Annie Kuster* pulled a question out of a fishbowl and began to read it aloud to Pete Buttigieg. “Alright, Pete, a classic New Hampshire question,” she said, adding that it was “important to all of us even if Washington have stopped paying attention.”

The attendee wanted to know Buttigieg’s thoughts on “the deficit.”

“I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable talking about the deficit,” Buttigieg said. “Because right now we got a president who comes from a party that used to talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, with a trillion-dollar deficit, and no plan in sight for what to do about it.”

“And yes,” he continued, “this should concern progressives, who are not in the habit of talking or worrying too much about the debt.” Buttigieg argued that the growing deficit would “start crowding out investment in safety net and health and infrastructure and education programs,” make it harder to fund economic stimulus programs should the economy demand it, and—in a talking point that might sound familiar to people who remember what life was like in 2011—hurt young people who “might be here when some of these fiscal time bombs start to go off.”

It was a little surprising—in my time on the campaign trail this year, I really haven’t heard a lot about the deficit, an object of Republican fixation during the Obama presidency that was used as justification for several debt-ceiling showdowns but which seems to have largely faded from view during the Trump administration. Maybe Buttigieg was speaking off the cuff and we shouldn’t read too much into it. But then, again, at a town hall on Sunday in Nashua, Buttigieg very conveniently received almost the exact same question out of the fishbowl.

“How important is the deficit to you?”

Buttigieg’s eyes lit up as he answered. “Important—that’s the short answer,” he said. “And I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable owning this issue. Because we’ve seen what’s happened with this president—a trillion dollar deficit, and his allies in Congress do not care. So we’ve got to do something about it!”

“It’s not fashionable in progressive circles, I think, to talk too much about the debt,” he acknowledged. But Buttigieg was there to offer some hard truths.

The idea that progressives don’t really care about this issue is an odd one, considering just how much of an emphasis the Obama administration placed on reducing the deficit (Obamacare reduced it!), and how much time it spent trying to broker a “grand bargain” to reform Social Security and Medicare. Democrats spent much of those eight years talking a lot about deficits, in part because Republicans spent much of that time pretending that Democrats weren’t. Then- and current-speaker Nancy Pelosi implemented pay-as-you-go rules mandating that bills in the House be paid for, and Pelosi has already signaled that PAYGO will be back in a Democratic administration. For the last few decades, Democrats have been the fiscal hawks.

But New Hampshire’s open primary does allow for a surge of moderate and conservative independents on Election Day, and Buttigieg—who nods to the prevalence of “future former Republicans” at his rally—perhaps thinks he stands to benefit from a little bit of lefty-bashing, real or imagined.

*Correction: This story originally misstated Rep. Annie Kuster’s current job title.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate