3. Raise the deficit by $8 Trillion
Yeah the responsibility as all Trumps ... well ya boi Biden has added almost 10 trillion in 2.5 yrs ....
In promoting his own spending priorities, President Joe Biden blamed his predecessor's "unpaid tax cuts and other spending" for increasing the national debt by nearly $8 trillion over four years. The total debt figure is correct, but trillions of that were due to bipartisan coronavirus relief...
www.factcheck.org
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ProPublica/Washington Post story published Jan. 14 noted that Trump had promised to reduce the debt, and instead legislation he signed added substantially to it, including the 2017 tax cut law.
The GOP tax law was supported only by Republicans using the same reconciliation process that the Democrats now want to use to avoid a Republican filibuster to pass the $3.5 trillion spending bill with only Democratic votes.
“One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch,” the news organizations wrote. “The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.”
But not all of that debt can be pinned solely on the former president. In fact, a lot of it had bipartisan backing, including trillions in coronavirus relief legislation, which was supported by Democrats as well as Republicans.
Under the U.S. Constitution, it takes Congress — not merely a president’s actions — to draft and pass legislation that would add to the debt. And measuring the increase over four years in office, as Biden does in his claim, isn’t the best way to assess the impact of an administration, Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us. A better measure is to look at what legislation the president signed into law and what impact those new laws would have.
For one, the debt added during a president’s term includes the impact of actions that predate the administration. In January 2017, the month Trump took office, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was already estimating a budget deficit of $559 billion for fiscal 2017, with hundreds of billions in yearly deficits each year thereafter, reaching a trillion-dollar deficit in 2023.
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Trump also signed —
but with Democratic support — bipartisan budget acts for
2018 and
2019 that “dramatically increased discretionary spending” and mostly weren’t paid for, Goldwein said.
By September 2020, CRFB
estimated the legislation and executive actions signed by Trump would be responsible for $3.9 trillion in higher deficits through 2026. The bulk of that — $2.3 trillion — was attributed to lowering taxes, while increases in defense and veterans spending ($950 billion) and nondefense discretionary spending ($700 billion) made up the rest.
“It is important to note that this debt was also approved by Congress, about half on a broad, bipartisan basis,” CRFB said.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic, which reduced government revenues and increased spending on unemployment benefits. Congress then passed, and Trump signed, several pieces of legislation to help the nation cope with the economic and public health challenges of the pandemic.
The ProPublica/Washington Post report estimated more than $3 trillion went to COVID-19 relief spending, which economists agreed was necessary to bolster the economy, the news outlets reported.
“The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar,” the story said. “So when the once-in-a-lifetime viral disaster slammed our country and we threw more than $3 trillion into COVID-19-related stimulus, there was no longer any margin for error.”
Meanwhile, the President has dedicated his entire tenure in office thus far to pushing massive spending increases for far-left policies such as
$400 billion in welfare for wealthy environmentalists and big corporations, $500 billion slush fund to states and localities
packed with waste, more than
$330 billion canceling student loans for wealthy borrowers, and
$80 billion to double the size of the IRS. President Biden’s track record clearly shows that his Administration is focused on prioritizing reckless spending while ignoring his Administration’s inflation crisis and America’s growing fiscal crisis.
“Washington Democrats have embarked on a massive, reckless spending spree that has driven consumer prices up 13.7 percent since President Biden took office and landed American families in an economic recession. After 19 months of this Administration, it’s clear that President Biden is all talk and no action on deficit reduction,”
said House Budget Committee Republican Leader Jason Smith (MO-08). “Just as a rooster taking credit for the sunrise, President Biden would have people believe deficits are coming down because he is cutting spending. But the facts tell a different story.
Claiming to be reducing the deficit while enacting policies that have added nearly $10 trillion in new spending is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Last year, under President Biden’s failed leadership, the deficit reached $2.78 trillion – $517 billion above what CBO said it otherwise should have been – because of his American Rescue Plan, which sparked the highest inflation in forty years and pushed government spending roughly 10 percentage points higher than its historical average, up to 30.5 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, under President Biden’s FY23 budget, deficits for the next decade would average approximately $1.6 trillion – $600 billion higher than the last decade.
"The truth is that spending is coming down from its height during the COVID-19 pandemic, which President Biden is using both to conceal his party’s radical spending agenda and claim that Democrats are reducing the deficit. At the same time, revenues are surging to further close the gap, rising to historic levels thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Trump. This year alone, revenues are projected to be more than 20 percent of GDP, the highest in 78 years and $1.7 trillion higher than in 2017 when TCJA was passed into law.
“In the same breath that the President claims he’s tackling inflation and deficit spending, he brags about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act – a $745 billion spending spree just enacted that will add $146 billion to the debt and only make the inflation crisis worse.
He has single handedly created over $1 trillion in new spending through executive actions without even a vote by Congress. Clearly, the President’s agenda prioritizes a massive tax and spending spree that gives Washington more command and control no matter the price tag or cost to the American people.”
