The left’s $7 trillion lie: Biden far outpaces Trump in racking up the national debt
By Stephen Moore and E. J. Antoni – Heritage Foundation Fellows | June 30, 2024
Excerpts:
Projection is blaming someone else for your own bad behavior.
We saw a classic case of projection in Thursday’s presidential debate, when President Biden — who is overseeing annual budget deficits of $2 trillion — asserted that his predecessor, Donald Trump, added more to the federal debt than anyone else….
Debate moderator Jake Tapper joined the chorus of federal finance falsehoods when he claimed Trump had “approved $8.4 trillion in new debt,” while Biden’s actions will increase the debt by (merely) $4.3 trillion over a decade.
Tapper was referencing a recent report by the left-leaning Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which twisted and turned the debt statistics in every contortionary way it could to reach its incredible conclusion.
CRFB, by the way, is a group that opposed the successful Trump tax reform in 2017 — yet supported several of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending bills…. It’s not nonpartisan, but a front group for the policies of the political left….
Over Trump’s entire term, including the 2020 spate of emergency COVID spending, the debt increased by $7.7 trillion — a staggering total, to be sure.
However, about 15% of that debt total was the result of Treasury’s choice to keep additional cash on hand during the pandemic.
Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, unsure how much tax revenue would be collected, borrowed well over $1 trillion — but kept it in reserve, without ever spending it.
Biden, however, spent that reserve, then borrowed another $7 trillion on top of it.
Instead of simply allowing that one-time emergency COVID spending to expire, Biden and the Democratic Congress continued spending at that same COVID-era level, thus institutionalizing multitrillion-dollar deficits.
Accounting for the changes in cash balances at the Treasury, the debt actually rose $6.5 trillion during Trump’s entire term — and is up $7.9 trillion in less than four years of Biden’s tenure.
Worse, the Treasury has announced that it anticipates needing to borrow another $800 billion from July through September of this year, followed by hundreds of billions more from October to December as federal finances further deteriorate.
All told, Biden will likely oversee a net increase in the debt of more than $9 trillion in a single term — a new record.
Biden wanted to spend $2 trillion more in the last year and a half, but conservatives in the House blocked the added bloat.
You can bet the farm that if the radical left wins the White House and Congress in 2024, that $2 trillion outlay will be first on their legislative agenda.
Biden’s other big lie, backed by the CRFB analysis, is that extending Trump’s tax reform will drown the economy in debt.
Yet federal tax revenues have increased since that tax reform was enacted — and federal revenues as a share of GDP have not fallen.
All of the increase in today’s debt has been due to massive, out-of-control federal spending — by both parties.
Trump spent and borrowed too much, full stop.
But with a debt headed to $50 trillion if reelected and a political agenda that stifles economic growth, Biden has set America on an unsustainable fiscal path that will lead to financial oblivion.
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Again: “All of the increase in today’s debt has been due to massive, out-of-control federal spending – by both parties.”
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