Biden deficit-slasher messaging undercut by ballooning national debt
For most of his time in the White House, President Joe Biden has bragged about a pandemic-era drop in the national deficit that occurred on his watch.
But the president's priorities are undercutting that messaging following a new score from the government's nonpartisan budget forecaster that finds everything from his program to cancel student loans to bipartisan aid to Ukraine and Israel adding to this year's estimated deficit.
Biden has long claimed that he's been able to expand government programs while keeping the debt in check. "People have more health insurance than they ever did before," he said at a May 22 campaign reception, "and we still cut the deficit." On other occasions, he's touted a drop in the deficit while citing a congressional expansion of the child tax credit.
Yet he will have a harder time making that case after the Congressional Budget Office revealed this week that its estimated budget shortfall for this year had been revised up from $1.5 trillion to $1.9 trillion.
That's a far cry from the record $3.1 trillion spent in 2020, driven by a host of COVID-19-era stimulus programs. Biden has used this figure as the benchmark he compares the deficit to under his administration.
But the national debt is still growing, by $1.4 trillion in 2022, $1.7 trillion in 2023, and now an estimated $1.9 trillion in 2024. The largest annual deficit of the Trump administration before 2020 was $980 billion.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-deficit-slasher-messaging-undercut-by-ballooning-national-debt/ar-BB1oDB79
