Whoever takes the presidential oath of office at noon Jan. 20, 2025, Democrat or Republican, will face a choice that so far has seen surprisingly little public discussion: keep Americans insurance bills low, or their taxes low.

After dropping sharply in 2022, the budget deficit is rising again, which was confirmed by a Monday report from the Congressional Budget Office. With that, a debate over spending and taxes is also revived, after being largely dormant since the Barack Obama administration.

Fighting the deficit, the difference between the governments revenues and its spending, would mean either cutting back or raising taxes. But the obvious areas to cut that a reelected Joe Biden or a new president would have to choose from are among the most politically sacred for each party: the individual portions of the 2017 tax cuts enacted under Donald Trump beloved by Republicans, or the subsidies for health insurance under Obamacare prized by Democrats.

Both are scheduled to end in 2025, making them obvious targets for savings.

If youre not willing to go after these, you have to be willing to go after something else, so that the dollars are in play, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum and a former economist in the George W. Bush White House.

Hit by the double whammy of COVID closures hurting the economy plus a pandemic-era expansion of the social safety net, the deficit more than tripled in 2020, to over $3.1 trillion. But as the economy recovered, so too did the governments budget.

The 2021 deficit slid to $2.8 trillion, and the 2022 deficit fell even more, to $1.4 trillion, allowing Biden to proudly proclaim he had cut it in half.

But with the 2023 budget year ending soon, the bad news for the White House is the deficit is going back up again, with no pandemic or economic crisis to justify the increase.

Republicans have recently been vocal about the need to do something about the deficit, even though the party was largely responsible for blowing past annual spending limits under Trump. But they are not the only ones concerned.