President Biden often boasts of his deficit-fighting prowess, but yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released projections that show cumulative deficit projections increased by $6 trillion in the two years since he was sworn into office.
Just last week, Biden said in his State of the Union remarks, “In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history.”
In reality, what happened was that Biden entered office in the wake of one of the biggest spending sprees in American history as part of the initial response to the Covid pandemic. In 2020, the deficit hit $3.1 trillion in a single year. So it is no big accomplishment to reduce that number substantially. In fact, deficits were already supposed to go down much more significantly from that level.
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.
So is it those awful rich tax cheats causing the problem? As a matter of fact, tax-revenue projections are up about $7 trillion as the economy emerged from the pandemic. So that is not the issue. The issue is that spending projections have soared $13 trillion, as a result of trillions of new spending from Biden, the growth of entitlements, and significantly higher projected interest on the debt.