In 2022, President Joe Biden often boasted that his administration had brought the deficit down by $1.7 trillion in a year. “The largest decline in American history,” he called it.
You don’t hear him talking like that now, because the annual deficit is expected to exceed $2 trillion this fiscal year.
Even when Biden was bragging about being a deficit hawk in 2022 and early 2023, multiple fact checks revealed the truth.
After the president’s 2023 State of the Union address, during which he repeated the claim that the deficit had been cut by $1.7 trillion, FactCheck.org reported, “The FY 2020 deficit was $3.13 trillion and the FY 2022 deficit was $1.375 trillion. That translates to a roughly $1.7 trillion drop. But the deficit in FY 2022 is still nearly 41% higher than it was in FY 2019, before the pandemic hit.”
“The deficits for FY 2021 and 2022 ended up totaling $4.15 trillion. … The deficits for those years ended [up] being about $840 billion more than expected,” the outlet added.
By comparison, total federal expenditures under former President Donald Trump in FY 2019 before COVID were $4.4 trillion. In FY 2023 under Biden, they were $6.1 trillion.
Keep in mind that the expenditures for FY 2023 — which started Oct. 1, 2022, and ran through Sept. 30, 2023 — were pretty much all in place prior to Republicans taking back control of the House in January 2023.
Not surprisingly, the increased level of spending led to continuing massive deficits even as the country put the pandemic in the rearview mirror.
In FY 2023, the deficit was $1.7 trillion, up from the $1.38 trillion in 2022.
And guess what? The deficit for 2024 is expected to top $2 trillion, because much of the spending the Democrats have in place is on autopilot unless it is rescinded.
Has Biden been a fiscally responsible president?
For the first quarter of FY 2024, the Treasury Department reported that the budget deficit was approximately $510 billion, which translates to over $2 trillion for the year at its current pace.
“The deficit has continued to pile up despite the Biden administration’s assurances that the Inflation Reduction Act, in addition to reducing prices, would shave ‘hundreds of billions’ off the deficit,” CNBC noted.
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022 as a scaled-down version of Biden’s Build Back Better proposal, raised taxes on corporations, which the administration projected would result in more than $300 billion in new revenue over a decade.
The problem is that the “green” initiatives included in the IRA are costing almost three times more than the administration forecasted, Bloomberg reported in August.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, working with the investment firm Goldman Sachs, updated their estimated cost of the IRA’s green initiatives from $385 billion over a ten-year period to in excess of $1 trillion in April.
Biden also signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law in November 2021, which attracted support from some Republicans in the Senate (though not a majority of the GOP caucus) and just a handful of GOP House members.
How irresponsible is that? Biden and the Democrats added trillions in new spending even when the U.S. was already running large deficits.
Then there has been Biden’s push to cancel student debt repayments owed to the federal treasury.
After the Supreme Court last summer struck down the president’s attempt to unilaterally forgive $400 billion without congressional approval, the Biden administration began looking for ways to do so anyway.
Forbes reported that the administration announced an additional $5 billion in student loan relief on Friday, taking the total so far to over $136 billion.
The budget deficit totaled $1.8 trillion – 7.7 percent of GDP – for calendar year 2023. Adjusting for student debt quirks, it was $2.1 trillion!! pic.twitter.com/Q5twY4pKbK
— Marc Goldwein (@MarcGoldwein) January 9, 2024
Back in the mid-20th century, the late Sen. Everett Dirksen reportedly cautioned while serving in Congress how federal spending can quickly get out of control, saying, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
Well, for the Biden administration, insert the number $100 billion.
Another big driver of the deficit is the interest payments needed to service the national debt, which now exceeds $34 trillion, up from approximately $27.8 trillion when Trump left office.
In FY 2023, the federal government took in $4.4 trillion and the interest payment for the national debt was $659 billion, leaving about $3.6 trillion to cover the rest of the expenses: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national defense… Hence the $1.7 trillion deficit.
That interest payment was up from $475 billion in FY 2022. By comparison, under Trump the amount was around $350 billion.
It is true that during the last year of Trump’s presidency in 2020, the deficit was $3.1 trillion due to COVID spending that was passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, but by the time he left office the economy was well on the way to recovery.
Therefore, the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which Biden signed into law in March 2021, was entirely unnecessary. Even worse, it helped spark the highest inflation the U.S. had experienced in 40 years.
The spiking inflation prompted the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to knock it back down, which in turn caused interest payments on the debt to increase.
Clearly, getting the nation’s fiscal house back in order must be a top priority of the next administration and Congress.
Biden and the Democrats demonstrated no proclivity to do so when they controlled the levers of power — quite the opposite.
Hopefully, the American people will elect a Republican Congress and president who have the willpower to save the nation from the fiscal abyss.
