The White House hailed President Joe Biden’s record of spending discipline as “second to none” while defending his student loan forgiveness plan’s price tag.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre touted the Biden administration’s “historic” deficit reduction while deflecting questions about how much the student loan measure will cost and how it will be paid for.
Jean-Pierre told reporters at Thursday’s daily White House press briefing that Biden’s “record on fiscal responsibility is second to none.”
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Biden signed into law the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan during his first year in office, followed by a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. He proposed a $3 trillion Build Back Better climate and social welfare spending bill but had to settle for a much smaller one.
That smaller reconciliation bill, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, contained $430 billion in spending. But the White House has argued the bill, which also includes tax increases, will reduce deficits by $275 billion.
The Biden administration has pointed to smaller budget deficits as the country pulls out of the pandemic as a sign of fiscal responsibility, hearkening back to the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton associated Democrats with balanced budgets and lower interest rates.
“Last year, we cut the deficit by more than $350 billion,” Biden said as he rolled out his student loan plan on Wednesday. “This year, we’re on track to cut it by more than $1.7 trillion by the end of this fiscal year. The single-largest deficit reduction in a single year in the history of America.”
Biden’s job approval ratings on the economy have tumbled as inflation, sparked in part by high federal spending, has raged at a 41-year high. He has approved or proposed trillions of dollars in additional spending. The White House hasn’t given an estimate as to how much the student loan debt relief program will cost, despite criticism from Democrats running in competitive races this fall.
The president has nevertheless contrasted his approach to that of the Republicans.
“I will never apologize for helping Americans working, working Americans and middle-class, especially not to the same folks who voted for a $2 trillion tax cut that mainly benefited the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations, that slowed the economy, didn’t do a hell of a lot for economic growth, and wasn’t paid for and racked up this enormous deficit,” Biden said on Wednesday. “Just as we’ve never apologized when the federal government forgave almost every single cent of over $700 billion in loans to hundreds of thousands of small businesses across … America during the pandemic.”
“No one complained that those loans caused inflation,” he added.
Jean-Pierre said Thursday that Biden’s economic stewardship is its own way of paying for student loan debt forgiveness.
“We do believe it will be fully paid for because of the work this president has done with the economy,” she told reporters.
Biden campaigned in 2020 as someone more centrist than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and practiced a certain amount of 1990s Clinton-style triangulation within the Democratic coalition. This was necessary to win over suburban voters who proved decisive to his margin of victory in the battleground states.
At the same time, Biden needed to turn out Sanders voters who stayed home or even voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He vowed to be the most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt, accepting the party’s shift from talking about deficit reduction to proposing multitrillion-dollar spending programs designed to transform the economy.
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Still, the White House has been careful to pair praise for its spending plans with boasts about deficit reduction. Biden’s economic advisers have pushed for tax revenues to limit deficit-financed spending.
“We are on track to cut the federal deficit by more than $1.7 trillion this year, the single largest deficit reduction ever,” domestic policy adviser Susan Rice told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.
