By Wes Walker,
From the Deficit Reduction Act to his arrogant chest-thumping through the last election cycle and into his SOTU, Joe Biden has been gaslighting us about the economy in general and the deficit in particular.
Let’s look at the big one. In the SOTU, Biden bragged:
In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history.
We knew when he said it that it was a damned lie.
But now we will put context to Biden’s $1.7 trillion lie.
It’s the same sleight-of-hand statistics tactic he used when he cherry-picked economic numbers (and dates) from the artificial COVID lockdowns to make it seem like Trump presided over historic losses. ]
During the COVID year of 2021, we set trillions of dollars on fire trying to stay ahead of the crisis. Using THAT year as a baseline to prove you are fiscally responsible is beyond cynical. And yet, he did precisely that, even though most of that ‘fiscal sanity’ he claimed as his own had nothing to do with is own policies and had everything to do with 2021 having a lot of one-off COVID spending items that were coming to a close. Most of the reduction occurred because Trump put an expiration date on his emergency pandemic spending. Those expired programs and spending accounted for most of Biden’s deficit decrease.
Here’s what he wasn’t telling us in his boasting at the State of the Union.
If you measure Biden’s record on deficits relative to expectations when he entered office, then he fares much worse.
In February 2021, a few weeks after Biden entered office and before he had signed any spending legislation, CBO projected that in 2021 and 2022, the U.S. would run deficits of $3.3 trillion. In reality, deficits have been $4.2 trillion over those two years.Drawing things out further, in that report from just after Biden was sworn in, CBO forecast that from 2021 through 2031, the U.S. would accumulate $14.5 trillion in deficits. In its latest report released on Wednesday, CBO now expects $20.5 trillion in deficits over that time frame — an increase of $6 trillion.
You might assume by the way he rails against billionaires not paying their fair share of fiscal shortfalls are the result of some kind of a revenue drop. It isn’t.
It can’t be. Projected revenues are up by $7 trillion.
Unfortunately, that jump in revenue isn’t enough to cover the $13 trillion increase in projected spending.
Cross-Posted with Clash Daily
