A year ago, President Joe Biden bragged about deficit reduction — he shouldn’t again. Despite higher tax revenues, Biden’s excessive spending has triggered staggering deficits and debt. It has also helped spark inflation and interest rates’ surge. It all comes back to inattention to his profligacy: Call it Biden’s deficit attention disorder.
When Biden introduced his budget last year, he said it would reduce the deficit by a significant margin. However, there were three problems. First, unsurprisingly, he boggled the numbers in his announcement: “And the budget I’m introducing today is going to reduce the deficit by nearly 10 billion — 3 billion over — trillion dollars over 10 years.”
Second, the reduction came in the make-believe world of budgeting, where rhetoric takes flight and fantasy is spun into numbers.
Third, and most importantly, Biden’s actual deficit record has been atrocious.
Biden’s lowest deficit was $1.375 trillion in 2022. Yet he somehow managed to tout this enormous number then: “We’re on track to reduce it, by the end of September, by another 1 trillion, 500 billion dollars — the largest drop ever.” How? Because his deficit the previous year in 2021 was $2.775 trillion due to excessive COVID-19 spending. In other words, reducing it was an extremely low bar that even the most liberal spender should have been able to meet.
But Biden has managed to spend far more than his predecessors anyway. Last year’s deficit jumped by more than $300 billion from 2022’s to $1.684 trillion. And the Congressional Budget Office projects Biden’s deficit this year to be $1.582 trillion.
All told, Biden will have rung up $7.4 trillion in deficits in just four years. These average out to a stunning 7.3% of gross domestic product annually. And of course, every penny of every deficit goes on to the federal debt, which the CBO estimates will be at $27.9 trillion (98% of America’s economy) at the end of 2024.
Biden’s tremendous deficits flow from his historic spending. No administration in America’s history ever spent $5 trillion in a year — until Biden’s. Ironically, neither has Biden’s because it has never spent less than $6 trillion in a year. All told, Biden will have spent $7.948 trillion above 2019’s pre-pandemic level of $4.447 trillion. On average, Biden has spent over a quarter of America’s GDP: 25.1%.
Of course, the Left will immediately claim that Biden’s deficits are not the fault of his profligate spending but because America was not taxed enough. The facts say otherwise. According to the CBO, from 1971 to 2023, federal revenues averaged 17.3% of GDP. During Biden’s administration, revenues have averaged 17.8% of GDP. And if you think 0.5% is inconsequential, then consider that America’s GDP in the fourth quarter of last year was $27.9 trillion — that 0.5% equates to hundreds of billions in additional revenues that Biden had. But it wasn’t enough.
No, not in the face of Biden’s spending. And despite his spending’s enormity and concomitant deficits and debt, Biden wanted more. Remember his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, each larded with trillions in additional spending? When these failed, he rebranded his budget-busting as the Build Back Better Act — again with trillions more. When that too failed, he finally settled for the Inflation Reduction Act, which even in a town known for hypocrisy is a prizewinner. And this does not include his attempt to forgive away hundreds of billions more in student loan obligations — debt that he wanted to pass on to the general taxpayer and that he is tirelessly trying to pursue despite the Supreme Court’s ruling against it.
The only thing that has slowed Biden’s spending urge has been others’ refusal to go along with it, including senators from his own party, the Supreme Court, and Republicans in Congress. But that refusal could not stop Biden’s deficit spending splurge from helping trigger historic inflation that topped out at 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest in 40 years. Bidenflation then triggered an interest rate spike (11 times in just a year and a half, the fastest rise since the 1980s, which produced the highest levels in two decades) to curb what his deficit spending had helped trigger.
As polling shows, the public hasn’t forgotten Biden’s role in inflation and interest rates. According to RealClearPolitics’s average of national polling, only 36.6% approve of Biden’s inflation performance. No wonder — because they continue to pay the higher costs of gas and groceries and home mortgages that Bidenflation brought upon them. According to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the consumer price index has risen 18% during Biden’s first three years in office, which is the greatest leap since Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
While Biden ignores his deficits, taxpayers are not so fortunate. They are the ones who truly suffer from Biden’s deficit attention disorder because they are the ones who are paying its costs in inflation and interest rates while their children will be paying its resulting debt.
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J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was the director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.
