The White House wants to spend $80 trillion over the next decade while only taking in $64 trillion in revenue. That's a $16 trillion deficit, and they say it's fiscally responsible.
This is a bit of legerdemain that needs some explaining. You see, the way that Biden reaches that conclusion is by comparing his 10-year deficits to the current 10-year deficit projections. Magically, that pencils out to $3 trillion in less spending than the current budget projections.
It doesn't mean that the plan will cut the deficit. All it means is that over 10 years, his magical projections are $3 trillion less than the previous magical projections.
Abracadabra, hocus pucus, presto! Isn't playing with magical money fun?
Biden's budget, released on Monday, projects lots of butter, lots of guns, and lots and lots of hope. Biden hopes that by the time it all blows up and destroys the mighty engine of the American economy, he will be dead and buried and won't have to hear his name used as a substitute for an obscenity.
Ordinarily, you'd expect the opposition to rise up and indignantly oppose Biden's massive $7.3 trillion budget for the 2025 fiscal year. Republicans have targeted "woke" spending in the budget. All $3 billion of it.
And, of course, they've also exposed billions in spending on green initiatives. But there is something completely unserious about this effort. The GOP would rather score cheap political points than sound the alarm about this growing national emergency.
"The level of borrowing under the President's budget would be unprecedented outside a war or national emergency," notes the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for lower deficits.
Running annual budget deficits well in excess of $1 trillion makes even less sense when you consider the current economic environment. The unemployment rate in the United States has been under 4 percent for more than two years. America's economy grew faster than any of the world's other major economies over the past year. We are relatively at peace. Tax revenue is hitting levels not seen since the 1960s, and Biden is proposing to raise taxes on corporations and wealthier Americans.
Put simply: If you can't even get close to balancing the budget under those conditions, when can you do it?
The White House should have the intellectual honesty to tell the American people that it expects them to continue financing an unstable pile of debt that will burden their children and sap long-term economic growth. To claim that this budget is fiscally responsibility merely adds insult to injury.
The administration doesn't care. That much is clear from its utterly irresponsible actions in piling on debt as fast as possible. The White House is racing the clock, hoping the collapse will be delayed until after Biden is out of office and in a nice, cushy retirement.
Will Trump be more responsible than Biden? He wasn't during his first term. Perhaps the spending and deficit emergency will force him to act responsibly.
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