The latest coinage from President Biden – something called “Maganomics” – cleverly seeks to link the procedural extremism of Donald Trump with the regressive policy of congressional Republicans. It’s a promising message, but it would be more convincing if the president’s own eponymous economic strategy, Bidenomics, were more focused.

In a speech delivered last week with an accompanying memo, Biden tried to contextualize a potential government shutdown by citing the fiscal proposals of the Republican Study Committee, which is a caucus comprising nearly 80% of House Republicans. This proposal, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, features almost $5 trillion in regressive tax cuts – offset by reducing spending on health care for low-income families, raising the retirement age for Social Security, and finding “more than $5 trillion of discretionary spending savings, almost all of which comes from nondefense discretionary cuts that have some specific proposals but not nearly enough to achieve that total.”

This is a fight Democrats are eager to have. They can contrast Republicans’ determination to take from the poor and give to the rich with the Bidenomics mantra of growth “from the middle out and the bottom up.”

And it’s a good pitch. The public’s assessment of the economy will probably improve with time, especially if inflation continues to fall, but it’s going to be hard to get voters to forget the price increases that already happened on Biden’s watch. So part of his re election strategy should be to raise questions not only about Trump’s character and conduct, but also about the policy choices Trump’s party is advocating – changes that have real implications for real people’s lives.

To state the obvious: Republicans have not given up on their longstanding aspiration to shrink the American social safety net, and today’s higher interest-rate environment would put more pressure than ever on them to actually deliver on this vision if they reclaimed power. If Republicans won control of the House, Senate and White House, they would almost certainly take a serious swing at implementing big swaths of their agenda. At the same time, Republicans are so ideologically committed to low taxes on the rich that one of their proposed spending cuts is to scale back efforts to catch wealthy tax cheats.

Yet Biden could make his case more clearly if he narrowed the focus of Bidenomics.

The president’s current budget proposal does contain about $3 trillion in deficit reduction, but it also includes $2.8 trillion in new spending – most leftover items from Build Back Better than Congress wouldn’t approve – offset by even larger tax increases. The president needn’t drop his support, conceptually, for ideas like universal preschool or more investment in child care. But it is very unlikely that any of this is going to happen. For the most part, for better or worse, presidents enact their agendas during their first years in office. Biden got his climate/energy bill signed into law. That’s his legacy.

He’ll have a cleaner and more honest message against Maganomics if he simply emphasizes the need to close the deficit by taxing the rich. The argument works on two levels.

On the one hand, he can tell voters that if they put Democrats in charge, they’ll tax the wealthy to bring the deficit and interest rates down. This policy will also fight inflation, make it easier to get a mortgage, boost private business investment and unlock a lot of housing inventory that’s currently frozen by homeowners’ reluctance to give up older and more favorable loans.

On the other hand, he can offer it as a framework for bipartisan cooperation. If Republicans want to come to the table and talk about ways to cut spending, that’s fine – but it needs to be done in a balanced way that asks the wealthy to pay their fair share. That’s a longstanding Democratic Party pitch that worked for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the court of public opinion, even as Republicans rejected it.

If some decide to change their mind, that would be great – and Biden could achieve the fiscal grand bargain that this country (well, some of it anyway) has long yearned for. He could drop the calls for additional spending – or at least agree to defer them until after inflation is conquered – to help seal the deal. Advocates for better child care and related causes would, of course, be disappointed by this turn. But Biden wouldn’t stand in the way of ambitious progressive legislation if the political and economic fortunes happen to break that way.

Realistically, however, it’s unlikely that any Republicans will change their minds. In that case, Biden’s argument about Maganomics will be all the stronger: While Republicans have become more extreme in their tactics, he can say, their core commitment to enriching the rich remains unshaken.

No president ever gets his entire agenda enacted. For the first two years of his presidency, Biden chose to prioritize his energy policy, and that’s what became law. In today’s political and economic climate, he should send a strong and clear signal about federal spending. It’s fine to talk about how Maganomics won’t work. What he needs to do is better explain how the next phase of Bidenomics will.

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