• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday raised the alarm after a top aide to presidential nominee Joe Biden said the burgeoning national debt might require more limited government spending.
  • “When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” Biden aide Ted Kaufman said. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit …forget about Covid-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.”
  • Ocasio-Cortez, who supports deficit spending and taxing the wealthy to fund programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, called Kaufman’s remarks “extremely concerning.”
  • “We need massive investment in our country or it will fall apart. This is not a joke,” she went on. “To adopt GOP deficit-hawking now, when millions of lives are at stake, is utterly irresponsible.”
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday condemned a suggestion from a top advisor to Joe Biden that the swelling deficit would restrain the ability of a Biden administration to boost government spending.

Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden confidante and the head of Biden’s transition team, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Wednesday that a potential Biden administration agenda would be thwarted by the burgeoning national deficit.

“When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” Kaufman said. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit.. forget about Covid-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.”

The remarks set off an uproar among progressives wary of Biden’s commitment to their ambitious policy goals. “This is extremely concerning. The pantry is absolutely not bare,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet.

"We need massive investment in our country or it will fall apart. This is not a joke," she said. "To adopt GOP deficit-hawking now, when millions of lives are at stake, is utterly irresponsible."

In a statement to Business Insider, Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates said the former vice president had underscored the urgency for additional government spending throughout his candidacy and "there will of course be stimulus spending in the short term to repair the historic damage Donald Trump has done to our economy and to build back better."

He went on: "In the long-run, Biden would ensure the ongoing costs of his agenda are paid for by having the wealthiest taxpayers and corporations pay their fair share for the future of our country, which is consistent with what Sen. Kaufman said."

Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left have embraced deficit spending and increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans to fund new federal programs aimed at strengthening the middle class.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have aligned themselves with Stephanie Kelton, an economist who advocates that the government shouldn't be required to balance the budget - a concept known as Modern Monetary Theory.

The freshman congresswoman has argued that the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis have "taken all of these slow moving crises that we have already been experiencing in the United States and basically pressed fast forward on every single one." She's pushing for significant increases in government spending to fund programs like Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, and clean energy investments.

Many economists say the US should spend what is necessary to pull its economy out of the coronavirus recession without worrying about the deficit. They cite the cheap cost of borrowing and low inflation.

Dean Baker, a senior economist at the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, said Kaufman was "wrong big time."

"The idea that we would not address pressing needs, like climate change, child care, and health care because we are concerned about the debt burden is close to crazy," Baker wrote in a blog post. "As long as the economy is not near its capacity, there is zero reason not to spend to address these priorities, and even when it does approach its capacity, we can impose higher taxes on the economy's big winners over the last four decades."

The federal government has racked up at least $4.7 trillion in new debt under Trump, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. A substantial portion came from the 2017 tax cuts, and the figure doesn't include nearly $3.5 trillion in emergency coronavirus spending approved by Congress so far.

Biden has unveiled an economic agenda that would raise $4 trillion in new revenue over a decade, the Tax Policy Center said in an analysis. Much of the new federal funding would come from ramping up taxes on the wealthiest Americans and businesses. Among the measures Biden seeks is a partial repeal of President Donald Trump's tax cuts.