other keystone measure in Reagan’s plan to overhaul Americans’ relationship to their government. Biden also voted for this measure, despite calling it “inequitable and inflationary.”12 The Reagan tax cut, the largest in postwar US history, was a lopsided giveaway to the very richest that led almost instantly to ballooning deficits and widening economic inequality. Over time, the super-rich would parlay their economic gains into growing political power by exploiting an ever-more corrupt political system—and use that power to roll back much of what had been built under New Deal presidents, creating a growing class of disillusioned, fed-up Americans. That it was the Democrats who had first pushed for cutting the top income tax rate, and that Reagan had initially rejected it, is just one of the ironies of all this.13
The tax cuts did something else, too. As Bruce Bartlett, one of Reagan’s advisers, would later explain, conservative intellectuals wanted “to force a major overall spending cut that would be a political non-starter without first passing a tax cut that creates a deficit so large, something must be done about it.” Indeed, Reagan himself quickly pivoted to fearmongering about the very deficit he had helped create. It was a perfect trap for a political class increasingly allergic to anything resembling New Deal liberalism. And the Democrats, spooked by anti-tax, anti-government revolts and desperate after Carter-era stagflation to prove themselves able money managers, fell right into it.14
Biden was out in front of this shift. Even as he voted against keeping the food stamp program going and for cuts in programs like federal pensions, he voted against Democratic efforts to plug the revenue hole left by Reagan’s tax cut with a series of admittedly regressive tax increases. They were too much of a burden on the middle class, he complained. Griping that the tax system was unfair and too complicated, he signed on to successive tax reform bills that were, in practice, massive tax cuts for the rich. One pared back the number of tax brackets to just three, none of which would pay more than 30 percent; another set a flat tax of just 14 percent for all individuals, one-upping even the flat tax proposal cooked up by the conservative Hoover Institution. 15
Five years after voting for Reagan’s tax cuts, Biden admitted they marked the defeat of a Democratic era. “The Reagan tax cuts have ended growth of the social agenda; it’s all come to a screeching halt,” he said. “There’s nothing [Democrats] can do but keep what’s there.”16
Just as in 1978, a looming reelection in 1984 was key to Biden’s evolution. His popularity, reflected in intimidating poll results, warded away his most formidable challenger for a second time: outgoing Delaware governor Pete du Pont. The task instead fell to John Burris, the state House’s former majority leader and a du Pont ally, whose campaign rested on the charge that Biden wasn’t doing enough to execute Reagan’s economic program.17
Burris was a weak candidate who ran a weak campaign, little different in substance from James Baxter’s. Biden won with 60 percent of the vote, only ten points less than what the polls had shown in March and an improvement on his previous result.18
Even so, Biden once again pulled out all the stops to win. Following what he termed an “olive branch” from Reagan—a spending freeze that also raised taxes—he linked arms with two Republican colleagues on the Senate Budget Committee to introduce his own freeze proposal in 1984. Acknowledging it would be labeled “draconian” (“I don’t know how to do anything else than bring it to a screeching, screeching halt,” he said), Biden’s plan cut $239 billion from the deficit over three years, almost $100 billion more than even Reagan’s proposal, and proposed doing it partly by eliminating scheduled increases for Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. It would, he said, “shock the living devil out of everyone in the US Senate.”19
Biden indulged in doomsday predictions to sell the measure, warning that letting deficits go untamed would “allow the economy to come crashing down” and lead to “an economic and political crisis of extraordinary proportions” within twelve to eighteen months. As bemused commentators would note decades later, it was all straight from the playbook of Tea Party darling Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand-worshiping congressman from Wisconsin who was bent on taking a meat cleaver to Medicare and Social Security. When Biden ran directly against Ryan for vice president in 2012, he warned voters Ryan was a threat to their hard-earned entitlements.20
Though the freeze failed, it was only the beginning. Biden’s ongoing distaste for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution didn’t stop him from introducing a similar amendment in 1984, this one tying spending to the growth of gross national product and inflation, which he referred to as a “pay-as-you-go” measure. Calling it a “much more realistic approach,” he proudly boasted that he had “literally plagiarized” it from du Pont, a Republican. Later that year, Biden backed the line-item veto—an anti-spending measure cherished by Reagan, the conservative movement, and, incidentally, Burris—and another budget measure, this one successful, requiring Congress to vote on freezing the budget for one year before it could raise the debt ceiling. His campaign then ran radio ads claiming that “cutting the deficit is more important than party differences.”21
Undergirding all this was the endless quest for campaign cash. To keep Burris at bay, Biden again drew on the paradoxical coalition of union and corporate donors to fund his campaign. Declining Burris’s challenge to limit spending at $1 million each, he raised $1.3 million by September, more than double his opponent, with most of his money coming not from individuals but PACs (it was vice versa for Burris, who had a mere $18,000 left by this point). On Biden’s donor list, names like the Seafarers Union, United Steelworkers, and United Mine Workers sat uneasily next to Chrysler, General Electric, and Pfizer. His campaign mailed 20,000 copies of a letter signed by local corporate bigwigs (including a du Pont) declaring him “a leader on fiscal responsibility.”22
As in 1978, Biden endorsed a core tenet of conservatism shortly before the election. Where he’d previously come out for fiscal austerity, he now took aim at the role of government.
“I see less of federal government dictating to the states,” he said. The federal government had “changed the mindset of the states” over the past 30 years, meaning “federal involvement with social and racial problems is less required” as long as antidiscrimination laws stayed on the books. He said he believed “education is best left to the states” and argued “you could make that case … for a whole range of areas where heretofore the federal government was involved.” Government, he said, would stay involved in the environment and issues like the global drug trade, but it would be “less involved in direct social questions like day care, education or health.”23
It’s debatable how far Reagan’s politics had actually seeped into the hearts and minds of the American public. After all, millions of working-class Americans of all races and backgrounds continued to rely on the federal government to keep them from poverty, ill health, or death’s door, and almost half the country didn’t even bother voting. But Biden appeared to be one of the converts. As his defeated opponent remarked in the wake of the election: “Win, lose or draw, Joe Biden isn’t a liberal any more … I think that’s a victory.”24
For his part, Biden blamed the Democrats for Reagan’s success. He urged them to support efforts to “clean our house” through a budget freeze and tax reform.25
Biden’s freeze never came to pass, but he did finally get the latter. Three years out from another election, Biden joined all but three of the Senate’s Democrats to hand Reagan another victory, passing the tax overhaul the president had requested. There would now be only four brackets, and while tax rates would rise for the lowest bracket, the rate for the top bracket was slashed from 50 percent to 28 percent, another boon for the nation’s wealthiest.
“On balance the bill is a good one,” said Biden. He wasn’t alone: the tax bill was the brainchild of two Democrats and passed with huge bipartisan majorities. The Reagan
