Let's start out with a simple statement: For decades, both political parties have been terrible on spending, deficits and debt. Republicans are fiscally irresponsible. Democrats are fiscally insane. Biden lies about these subjects on a routine basis, attempting to portray mind-boggling, unprecedented, blowout spending binges as "returning our fiscal house to order," and flagrantly falsely claiming that he's reduced the national debt. Biden has taken pandemic-era emergency levels of spending and effectively baked them in as new and utterly unsustainable baselines. He is running truly staggering annual deficits, especially in an era in which the US is in neither a war nor a recession (at least not yet, that is).
Some Biden supporters on social media are circulating and hyping up an Axios story purporting to show Trump's record as twice as bad on spending borrowing as Biden's. To be clear, Trump was quite bad on deficits and debt, even before the COVID explosion. But the two presidents' annual deficits (yearly shortfalls which accumulate into the ever-growing national debt) tell a very different story. In this short Twitter/X thread, I excised the two pandemic years (doing something of a favor to Biden, as I noted) and served up the stats -- which admittedly reflect an imperfect metric:
pre-pandemic (Trump)
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 24, 2024
2017 deficit: ~$670B
2018: ~$780B
2019: ~$980B
[mid-pandemic (both)
2020 deficit: ~$3.13T
2021: ~$2.77T]
post-pandemic (Biden)
2022 deficit: ~$1.38T
2023: ~$1.7T
2024 (projected): $1.9T
Source: US Treasury Dept
(2/2)
First, let's recall that Congress controls the purse strings, so it's a vast over-simplification to pin all federal spending on presidents. But even as shorthand, Biden's record is clearly worse. Just look at the US Treasury-furnished numbers. Before the once-in-a-century pandemic emergency, Trump's annual deficits were clicking toward $1 trillion. In the teeth of the emergency, which ill spread over two years, deficits hit nearly $6 trillion. Then after the emergency passed, Biden's deficits started at nearly $1.4 trillion, and will come close to touching $2 trillion this year alone. Taken together, Trump's three non-COVID years in office resulted in more than $2.4 trillion in combined deficits. Biden's three non-COVID years will hit nearly $5 trillion in combined deficits. Biden's number is roughly double Trump's. And the current president's unilateral, unfair and illegal student loan bailouts are a big contributor to this year's ballooning:
The federal budget deficit will hit $1.9 trillion this fiscal year, according to an updated projection released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office. That’s 27% – or $400 billion – larger than the agency estimated in February. Looking longer term, the nation’s debt will approach $57 trillion in fiscal year 2034, nearly $2.5 trillion higher than previously projected, as spending on Social Security, Medicare and interest payments soar and revenues fail to keep pace. The growing imbalance is expected to loom large over upcoming congressional budget and tax battles. Most of the spike in the fiscal 2024 deficit stems from four factors that are expected to boost projected spending. The largest is a $145 billion increase that’s partly due to changes the Biden administration made to student loan repayment plans and a new, proposed forgiveness program that would waive some accrued interest for millions of borrowers. The latter has yet to be finalized but could take effect as soon as this fall.
I'll leave you with two reminders: First, Democrats like to pretend that the Trump/GOP tax cuts and reforms of 2017 are an overwhelming factor in our national debt problem. Nonsense. The 'price tag' of those tax cuts is totally dwarfed by "mandatory spending" on various entitlement programs. Beyond that, letting people keep more of their own money does not count as 'government spending,' and those tax cuts boosted the economy into stellar growth, resulting in record-high revenues. Spending still out-paced those revenues, but that's a spending problem, not a tax cuts problem. Also, the post-tax-relief economy was humming until China's lab leak sent us a world-disrupting, deadly plague. Second, if Biden and nearly every single Congressional Democrat had gotten their way, the 'Build Back Better' spending orgy would have slammed the US with even more inflation and even worse deficits -- to the tune of additional trillions. The two Democrats who stopped that insanity, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, aren't seeking re-election. Biden "benefits" in this calculation because his biggest priority failed, for which he earns zero credit.