Trump VP pick JD Vance: What are his views on taxes, deficits, entitlements?

Former President Trump's selection of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as his running mate and vice presidential nominee, has brought Vance's policy views into the spotlight, given his relatively recent entry into electoral politics.

Vance has served in the U.S. Senate for about a year and a half, having defeated Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan in 2022 and being sworn in as Ohio's junior senator in January 2023. Vance's platform in the Senate race mirrored many of those touted by Trump during his administration, even though he was critical of the former president amid his first run for the White House.

Although he is only in his 18th month as a senator, Vance has been outspoken in several areas of economic policy since his election as well as during his campaign. Vance has also discussed economic policy as it related to the issues of rural poverty and social breakdown that he wrote about in his memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy."

Here's a look at some of Vance's commentary and views about key aspects of economic policy, including his views on taxes, the national debt and budget deficits as well as entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

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Taxes

In a profile of Vance written by Politico in March, Vance expressed ambivalence about some provisions of the Trump-era tax cuts that were enacted in 2017 through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

"Do I think there was some more standard GOP tax fare, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't? Yeah, absolutely. Do I think cutting the top marginal rate is like a high priority for me? No, I don't," Vance said. Politico noted that Vance acknowledged he would have voted for the bill if he had been in the Senate at the time.

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Vance said in an interview with the New York Times last month that he opposes higher taxes for the middle class and, although he isn't inherently opposed to raising taxes on the wealthy, he thinks they could do more harm than good while not addressing structural issues in the economy.

"I'm not philosophically against raising taxes on anybody. But you have to ask yourself: What are the taxes we're raising, and where are they coming from? … Raising middle class taxes, I don't like that idea, for obvious reasons. You can get some revenue out of raising taxes on wealthy Americans, but there's no way that you can run an economy at a structural growth rate of around 1% with demographics that are getting worse and worse and solve the problem by taxing rich people."

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Deficits & debt

Last year after taking office, Vance expressed frustration with a bipartisan spending deal that Congress reached in the spring of 2023, known as the Fiscal Responsibility Act. The bill, which was signed into law by President Biden, suspended the debt limit until January 2025 and imposed temporary budget caps on federal discretionary spending, providing modest deficit reduction.

"We should stop calling it a 'clean debt ceiling increase.' Passing a debt ceiling increase without any reforms to our nation's broken finances isn't clean. It's dirty as hell," Vance wrote in a post on X. 

He later wrote, "Deficit reduction isn't even my most important issue. But we didn't get permitting reform. We didn't get border security. It's not entirely clear we got anything."

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This April, Vance wrote that he views stabilizing the debt at a manageable level is one of the key issues facing the country amid debate over a bill that would provide additional defense aid made by U.S. industry to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

"The task before [us] is simple: to secure our border, rebuild our country after decades of neglect, get our debt to manageable levels. Let's do that first, and then we can argue how we should deploy rebuilt American power," Vance wrote on X.

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Social Security & Medicare

In January and February 2023, while Congress was debating a debt ceiling increase and spending caps, Vance said Trump was "100% correct" to urge Republican lawmakers not to press for reforms to Medicare or Social Security amid the negotiations. Trump had said, "Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security."

"I would like to hear zero words about cutting Social Security and Medicare while we're still dropping a few billion a month on Ukraine," Vance later wrote on X.

The trust funds that help finance Social Security and Medicare benefits beyond those funded by payroll taxes are on pace to be depleted roughly a decade from now. Under current projections, Social Security's trust funds are on track to be exhausted by 2035, when just 83% of benefits would be payable (a monthly cut of about $325 based on the average benefit of $1,907 as of January 2024), while Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund will only be able to pay 89% when it's depleted in 2036.

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In his New York Times interview last month, Vance offered a broader insight into his views about the fiscal problems facing Social Security, which he said "are downstream of much deeper problems."

"One way of understanding the Social Security problem is: old people can't work, young people can, babies can't. So, people at a certain age support the babies and the old people. And typically in our society, that's people between the ages of 18 and 65," Vance said. "If the argument here is we have to cut Social Security, then what you're effectively saying is we just have to privatize what is currently a public problem of who pays for the older generation. And I don't know why people think that you solve many problems by taking a bunch of elderly people and saying, 'You're on your own.'"

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Vance went on to say that he thinks raising tariffs, which are taxes on imported goods, would help those programs' finances as well as bring more Americans back into the labor force and result in higher productivity growth, wages and additional tax revenue.

"Take those 7 million prime-age men not in the labor force. Those people are supported, very often, by public resources. You shift millions of those men from not working to working; you increase wages across the board; you increase tariffs; and I think that you buy yourself a whole hell of a lot more than the nine or 10 years that the actuaries say that we have," Vance said.