Biden Claims He ‘Worked Hard’ to Lower the Deficit, but He Actually Added $800 Billion

President Biden, defending his plan to add more IRS agents, repeated a dubious claim about his record on the deficit:

In reality, his deficit boast is highly misleading. Before Biden even took office, deficits were projected to decline. In 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, the federal government spent trillions of dollars while lockdowns and the resulting economic disruption deprived the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue. While the deficit did go down from its Covid peak as the economy opened up, Washington measures budgets against baseline expectations. And on this score, deficits in each of his first two years in office were higher than projected when he took office.

In February 2021, the Congressional Budget Office released projections based on the laws that were in place when Biden was sworn into power. The deficit was expected to be $2.3 trillion in fiscal year 2021 and $1.1 trillion in 2022. Under Biden, deficits swelled to $2.8 trillion in 2021 and  $1.4 trillion in 2022. In total, that means the Biden deficits are running about $800 billion above expectations in just his first two years in office.

Biden’s defenders would argue that he is technically correct, as the deficit in fiscal year 2020 was $3.1 trillion and in 2022 it was $1.4 trillion. But if they are going to advance that argument, then I have a thought experiment. Over the next decade, the CBO projects that spending on Social Security and health-care programs will be about $39 trillion, which is an increase of $9 trillion over current spending levels. Let’s say a conservative released a plan that would spend $36 trillion over the next decade. Would Biden and his defenders say that this plan represents a $6 trillion increase (which is technically true), or a $3 trillion cut (which it would be relative to CBO projections)?

I think we all know the answer, yet Biden continues to perpetuate these bogus deficit-reduction claims, and is rarely called out.