President Biden, offering an update on the debt ceiling negotiations, yesterday: “I might note parenthetically: In my first two years, I reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion. No president has ever done that.”
As you likely know, this is not even close to true. When Biden took office January 20, 2021, the national debt was $28.4 trillion. The national debt is now $31.4 trillion, an increase of $3 trillion.
Biden has made similar false boasts and claims during his presidency with metronomic frequency. And it may surprise you that almost every fact-checker has, at least once, called Biden out for these false boasts about reducing the debt. CNN, Newsweek, the Washington Post, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact — Biden repeats these inaccurate numbers often enough that just about all of those fact-checkers have felt obligated to come out at one point or another and say, “no, Biden does not have his numbers correct.”
Sometimes those fact-checkers have judged Biden rather leniently, but they all acknowledge that under Biden, the national debt has gone up, not down, as the president claims.
Part of the problem is that Biden uses the terms “deficit” and “debt” interchangeably, even though they mean two different things. The federal deficit is the amount by which the government’s expenses exceed its tax revenues in a given year. The national debt is the total of all the accumulated debts. Because of the temporary nature of some of the extraordinary spending during the pandemic, the deficit has indeed gone down some from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2021, and from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2022. But so far this fiscal year, the deficit is higher than the same period last year.
Biden has been called out for this repeatedly, and he just keeps saying it. This doesn’t make fact-checking worthless, but it does raise the question of how much the verdicts of the fact-checkers matter. Clearly, being called out by fact-checkers isn’t going to change Biden’s boasts, nor is it going to get the White House staffers to tell Biden to stop making those boasts. Biden gets called out for these boasts very, very rarely. And there’s little sign that voters care much.
Why do politicians lie so much? Because most of the time, there’s no discernable negative consequence.