If you supported Joe Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign, his proposed budget will disappoint you.
The Democratic president proposed a $6 trillion budget for fiscal year 2022. If enacted, this would result in a $1.8 trillion deficit for the year. While former President Donald Trump was no fiscal hawk, the federal government spent $4.4 trillion and ran a $984 billion deficit in fiscal year 2019, the last pre-pandemic budget.
For the old Biden, a massive deficit was a problem, but he too has abandoned fiscal responsibility in favor of big government.
When Biden ran for president in 2008, fiscal responsibility was a tenet of his platform. It said he wanted “to kick deficit spending” and touted the country’s budget surplus in the late 1990s under President Bill Clinton. Biden wanted the government to adopt a “Pay-As-You-Go” budget where Congress would have to cut spending or raise taxes in an area if it wanted to increase spending elsewhere.
Biden even had a plan for how he wanted to reduce spending: Cut military spending by bringing the troops home, repeal parts of the Bush tax cuts that benefited the wealthy, and end subsidies for oil companies. Whether or not you agree with how Biden wanted to reduce spending, at least he gave the deficit thought back then.
Nowadays, Biden doesn’t talk about the deficit. There are people in his party such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who embrace Modern Monetary Theory, which posits that inflation is the only limit to government spending. If you ask them how they will pay for the programs they propose, you will not get a straight answer.
You might get an absurd answer out of someone such as Sen. Ed Markey, who falsely claimed that cutting the defense budget could fund both “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal. The entire defense budget is about one-tenth of the cost of both those programs. (This is ironic because Markey wants Big Tech companies to censor more people for what he sees as spreading false information. If they did, he would no longer be on any social media platforms.)
Despite what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party might argue, ignoring the national debt won’t make it go away. It might make it worse.
There are consequences for running up big deficits and piling up the national debt. It can shrink economic activity. The Congressional Budget Office, for example, projected in 2019 that if the national debt was allowed to continue to grow at its current rate, the average income per household would drop by about 10% by 2050. The deficits would also result in higher deficits in the future because the country will pay interest on that debt — and interest rates rising, as they may in the future, would hurt. High interest rates would also discourage private investment, which would worsen the economy.
After the federal government’s spending blowout in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden should look at ways to reduce the deficit, not increase it.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
