Conservatives: Bright Side of a Joe Biden Victory

I'm a conservative, but I tried to look at this as non-partisan as possible since he has a good chance of winning. I don't imagine this video being particularly popular today, but in 2 years we may look back and see this as the most accurate prediction of what happened...Show more

According to the Economist, Joe Biden has an 86% chance of winning.

If you are a small-government conservative like me then how can we look at the bright side of a Joe Biden victory?

For one, I’d argue that even more important than the U.S. Presidency is the U.S. Senate. The Presidency switches party hands almost every 8 years so even if Trump can hold onto the White House it’ll be much harder for Republicans to win again in 2024 at which point the leftist wing of the Democratic party would be so loud that they could be unstoppable.
Also according to the Economist, Democrats have a good, but smaller chance of flipping the Senate — 67%. The bright side of a Joe Biden victory for Republicans is if Republicans can hold onto the Senate then Joe Biden would be drastically limited in his ability to do anything too progressive, which in effect may pull the country closer to the center as the mainstream media would grasp at strings to explain how nothing is a lot.
I’d also argue after doing a ton of research on the subject that the only way we will balance the federal budget someday is with a divided government where the President is a Democrat and the Congress is Republican. We had an opportunity to at least cut the federal deficit in 2015 when Obama/Biden offered to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for closing tax loopholes on billionaires and millionaires, but Mitch McConnell refused to negotiate. In 2020, Mitch McConnell is starting to pretend like he cares about the national debt again so I guess we’ll see what happens in the 2020′s, but one of the reasons I say it needs to be a divided government is because, for one, Mitch McConnell himself said it needs to be a divided government, and two, that is the only time it has happened in modern American history. Joe Biden was also the guy who introduced the Federal Spending Control Act and who voted several times for a Balanced Budget Amendment. If 2020 Joe Biden wakes up as 2001 Joe Biden then we’d have the most fiscally conservative president in decades.
But what if Democrats win both the Presidency and the Senate then what can we expect from a Biden administration?
Obama/Biden administration spent more on defense than the Bush administration. Joe Biden has also said on the campaign trail that he wants to increase defense spending on “unmanned capacity, cyber and IT” so he may in effect keep the defense budget around where it is. Obama/Biden also had more drone strikes than the Bush administration and Joe Biden has historically been more hawkish than Obama so who knows what wars the Pentagon may pressure a politically flexible Joe Biden to get us into.
Now using history as our guide, the two best historical markers for what happened during a unified government (one party controls the House, Senate, and Presidency) are 2008 when Obama was elected and in 2016 when Trump was elected. Both parties ended up losing control of the House in the upcoming midterm election so if history repeats itself Joe Biden’s unified government would only last 2 years.
How much could a Biden-led unified government do in 2 years?
First, the answer depends on if Joe Biden will repeal the Senate filibuster. As of yet, he has not fully committed to doing so, and the Washington Post currently has him marked as a “no,” therefore with just a one-to-three vote majority in the Senate (some of those senators being moderators from red states) and a passionate conservative Republican minority it could be hard for him to do much even then. There are other Senate procedures Joe Biden could invoke to get around the filibuster, but nonetheless, without the filibuster’s removal, his agenda will be slowed down.
In the first 2 years, Joe Biden will have to spend a lot of time nominating officials, reentering treaties, readjusting the regulatory apparatus with executive orders, and perhaps passing additional COVID relief. This leaves little time before the 2022 midterm election for Joe Biden to dive into his heftier campaign promises.
The first legislative priority for a new president is often cutting taxes: Trump, Obama, and Bush. Interestingly, Bill Clinton’s first legislative priority was to raise taxes and cut spending in order to pursue deficit reduction. I therefore believe Biden’s first legislative priority would be repealing the Trump tax cuts and replacing it with a tax increase on wealth and a tax cut for workers, which is how Joe Biden describes his plan on his website: “A TALE OF TWO TAX POLICIES: TRUMP REWARDS WEALTH, BIDEN REWARDS WORK.” Genuine fiscal conservatives may find this proposal appealing because factually speaking, the Trump tax cuts did not “pay for themselves.” Factually speaking.