With the mid-term elections fast approaching in less than five months, and with the polls showing the Democrats are going to take a shellacking, President Biden is searching for any accomplishments during his first 17 months in office. Unfortunately, there haven’t been many.
Over the last few weeks, the president has been touting how the federal budget deficit has come down on his watch. While the deficit is expected to fall significantly this year, it has nothing to do with anything President Biden has done since he took office.
He doesn’t want us to know this, so that’s what we’ll clear up today. Let’s start with the facts.
Since President Biden took office early last year, America’s national debt has risen by $2.4 trillion. That’s actually not his fault, not most of it anyway. The national debt has continued to skyrocket because of massive federal spending put in place before Biden took office.
Most of that federal spending to fight the effects of Covid-19 has come to an end this year, so naturally the federal budget deficit is going down significantly. This year’s deficit is expected to be less than half of last year’s record $2.8 trillion shortfall.
Smart reporters and commentators have pointed out, correctly, that this drop in the deficit is a mirage created by the end of the federal government’s massive COVID-19 emergency spending, which blasted the budget deficit to never-before-seen levels during each of the past two fiscal years. The point is, this big drop in the deficit is not due to anything President Biden has done.
Yet he now wants to take credit for it. Starting in this year’s State of the Union address and continuing through his op-ed last month in The Wall Street Journal, President Biden has constantly claimed to have engineered a huge one-year reduction in the budget deficit. The fact is, he and his policies have had nothing to do with it.
Put differently, the White House’s claims of deficit reduction are not merely “misleading” or “deceitful,” they are absolutely, definitively false. The record budget deficits were on-track to fall significantly no matter what the Biden administration was going to do.
To prove it, all you have to do is look at the current budgetary baseline released last month by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and compare it to the baseline from February 2021. In other words, compare the trajectory of deficit spending at the very end of the Trump administration to the current trajectory of deficit spending after one year of Biden’s term in office.
Here’s how that looks, courtesy of David Ditch, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who helpfully put the two trajectories into a single chart:
You can see the big drop-off from fiscal year 2021 to fiscal year 2022 that the White House has been talking about. This huge drop is due to the ending of massive government spending programs initiated to fight the effects of Covid-19 on the economy, not anything the Biden administration has done.
The question, of course, is why the president would be trying to claim he and his policies made this happen. The only answer is because he can. And he and his advisors know most Americans won’t know his claims are false.
What we should be discussing is the gap between the red bars and the grey bars in the chart above in each year over the next decade. This gap is the result of deficit spending President Biden signed into law over the past 16 months, including the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure package and spending increases included in the federal budget which passed in March. That’s where the real story is.
Without getting too far into the weeds, the root of much of this confusion is the fact that lawmakers use the term “deficit” to describe both the gap between revenue and spending in a single year and that same gap over longer periods of time – in most cases a 10-year budget window for the purposes of calculating deficits. Lawmakers use this to game the CBO’s deficit scoring system as much as possible in order to get spending bills passed.
The point here is this: The federal budget deficit will begin rising again next year and will rise faster and higher than it would have before Biden took office if his spending policies are continued, as the CBO’s projections make clear.
The bottom line is, the Biden administration will have added to the deficit, whether or not he is re-elected. That’s a fact, as the president likes to say, and a fact that doesn’t have to be wrapped in caveats or conditionals.
In conclusion, President Biden gets no credit for the huge drop in the federal deficit this year, and the policies he has put in place since taking office will mean a huge rise in the deficit and our national debt over the next decade if continued.
Hopefully, we can change that if Republicans win control of Congress in November. But sadly Republicans have proven in recent years they can spend and run deficits just like the Democrats, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
We’ll just have to see. I hope this helps.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.