By now, you all know that Biden has a penchant for stretching the truth or, in some cases, just making things up.
Remember when he said he was arrested with Nelson Mandela in South Africa? Yeah, it didn’t happen… Biden did, in fact, go to South Africa as a U.S. Senator once. And yes, it was around the same time as one of Mandela’s incarcerations. But Biden was most certainly not arrested there, nor did he spend any real time with Mandela.
And don’t let the former Obama Vice President fool you about a drunk driver killing his first wife and children, either. Again, his wife and children were killed. But it was a mere accident. And the other driver was not drunk or otherwise impaired.
As it turns out, the details matter.
Of course, Biden seems to have never really learned that lesson. And it seems it has gotten him into a bit of trouble once more.
This time, it’s for claiming that he’s worked wonders to reduce the national deficit in the last year, bringing it back down to what it was in former President Donald Trump’s last year in office. And he says he did it by tackling inflation…
As he said on Friday, “My friends on the Republican side like to paint me as the ‘big spender.’ But let’s look at the facts. Facts matter.”
He then went on to claim that the deficit “exploded” under Trump, “rising every single year he was in office.” But, of course, under Biden, “we’re on track to cut the federal deficit this year by $1.7 trillion.” According to him, that’s the largest climb in our nation’s history.
But just like everything else Biden has just about ever claimed, there are only half-truths here.
For starters, we have to note that while the Biden administration may, in fact, be working on cutting the national deficit, this comes only after that same administration raised it by $1.9 trillion in March of 2021 by signing the American Rescue plan into law.
Well, that’s not entirely true either. You see, the American Rescue Plan initially called for $1.9 trillion to get all of their agenda items underway. But as numerous economic experts and advisers have noted, it actually raised the national deficit by a whopping $2.8 trillion by the end of 2021.
In fact, as former Clinton Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers noted, the plan is the “least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.”
Along with Obama Treasury official Steven Rattner and others, he warned that the move would be highly inflationary. Perhaps that’s why inflation currently sits at 8.3 percent, the highest it’s been in 40 years.
Thankfully, some of the most devastating aspects of the American Rescue Plan have expired and become null and void, thanks in large part to the supposed end of COVID-19.
However, if Biden had gotten his way, those policies would still be in play. Remember his infamous Build Back Better plan? It would have made several of those debt-adding American Rescue Plan points permanently. Additionally, it would have supposedly added another $2.1 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.
Of course, that’s just assuming that some of those aspects would expire too. If they didn’t, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that plan would have eventually made that amount double, adding somewhere around $4.9 trillion to the national debt.
Thank God, not all of the Senate Democrats fell in line to support that plan, so it never got passed.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped Biden from continuing to push it.
It’s also important to note that while the national deficit has lowered over the last year or so, it actually has little to do with Joe Biden or his administration. In fact, it has much more to do with Donald Trump’s policies and tax cuts. Even Biden himself has been forced to admit that in at least some form.
On Friday, he conceded that our federal deficit has come down thanks to “historic economic growth” caused by tax cuts, none of which are his.
And that point is true. In the fiscal year 2021, the U.S. Treasury took in some $4 trillion in revenue…and will receive another $4.8 trillion this year.
Yet, those are the same tax cuts that Biden is even now suggesting to end.
As both Biden and I said, the facts matter. And the truth of the matter is that Biden hasn’t done squat to help our economic growth or national deficit situation…
