If Donald Trump does not get control of the deficit his legacy will be ruined - and so will the country.
Posted on 01/08/2025 6:28:31 AM PST by Phoenix8
Projection is blaming someone else for your own bad behavior.
We saw a classic case of projection in Thursday’s presidential debate, when President Biden—who is overseeing annual budget deficits of $2 trillion—asserted that his predecessor, Donald Trump, added more to the federal debt than anyone else.
It’s part of the latest leftist argument: that if Trump wins the election, he will run deficits twice as large as Biden would.
Debate moderator Jake Tapper joined the chorus of federal finance falsehoods when he claimed Trump had “approved $8.4 trillion in new debt,” while Biden’s actions will increase the debt by (merely) $4.3 trillion over a decade.
Tapper was referencing a recent report by the left-leaning Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which twisted and turned the debt statistics in every contortionary way it could to reach its incredible conclusion.
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CRFB, by the way, is a group that opposed the successful Trump tax reform in 2017—yet supported several of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending bills.
It’s not nonpartisan, but a front group for the policies of the political left.
The fundamental flaw of the CRFB analysis is revealed if we examine the projections of the Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO’s projection for 2021, the last fiscal year of the Trump administration, forecast the federal debt to reach about $35.3 trillion by 2031, that is, over the next decade.
Today, 3½ years into the Biden administration, the latest estimates from the CBO project the debt will hit over $42.5 trillion by 2031.
January 2021 and June 2024 CBO forecast graph The Congressional Budge Office forecasts an increase in debt. In other words, the CBO now expects the debt to be $7.2 trillion higher than it had projected when Trump left office—all because of Biden’s reckless spending policies.
Treasury Department figures also show the debt growing much faster under Biden.
Over Trump’s entire term, including the 2020 spate of emergency COVID spending, the debt increased by $7.7 trillion—a staggering total, to be sure.
However, about 15% of that debt total was the result of Treasury’s choice to keep additional cash on hand during the pandemic.
Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, unsure how much tax revenue would be collected, borrowed well over $1 trillion—but kept it in reserve, without ever spending it.
Biden, however, spent that reserve, then borrowed another $7 trillion on top of it.
Instead of simply allowing that one-time emergency COVID spending to expire, Biden and the Democratic Congress continued spending at that same COVID-era level, thus institutionalizing multitrillion-dollar deficits.
Accounting for the changes in cash balances at the Treasury, the debt actually rose $6.5 trillion during Trump’s entire term—and is up $7.9 trillion in less than four years of Biden’s tenure.
Worse, the Treasury has announced that it anticipates needing to borrow another $800 billion from July through September of this year, followed by hundreds of billions more from October to December as federal finances further deteriorate.
All told, Biden will likely oversee a net increase in the debt of more than $9 trillion in a single term—a new record.
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Biden wanted to spend $2 trillion more in the last year and a half, but conservatives in the House blocked the added bloat.
You can bet the farm that if the radical left wins the White House and Congress in 2024, that $2 trillion outlay will be first on their legislative agenda.
Biden’s other big lie, backed by the CRFB analysis, is that extending Trump’s tax reform will drown the economy in debt.
Yet federal tax revenues have increased since that tax reform was enacted—and federal revenues as a share of GDP have not fallen.
All of the increase in today’s debt has been due to massive, out-of-control federal spending—by both parties.
Trump spent and borrowed too much, full stop.
But with a debt headed to $50 trillion if reelected and a political agenda that stifles economic growth, Biden has set America on an unsustainable fiscal path that will lead to financial oblivion.
If Donald Trump does not get control of the deficit his legacy will be ruined - and so will the country.
Agree
Jake “the snake” tapper, is such a sh!thead. I can’t wait till he is gone. How can they keep paying this creep.
I do not see either political party making any serious attempt to reduce the budget deficit. Republicans have only two policies: increase spending and cut taxes. Democrats have only one policy: increase spending even faster than the Republicans.
Sadly probably true.
Decreasing spending means cutting things and that makes people hangry.
That seems to be the inherent weakness of a republic:
“ “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
—-1951 The Oklohomian, supposedly originated from a Scootish lad named Tytler around 1800.
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If Donald Trump does not get control of the deficit his legacy will be ruined - and so will the country.
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You mean the, “If they send me a bloated budget, I’ll VETO it!” Pres. Trump? The same one that SIGNED each/every bloated budget that crossed his desk??
Sorry, but neither of the faux dichotomy parties are going to ‘take the hit’ w/ the deficit, let alone debt, they’ve (illegally) racked up.
The Trump who went behind the backs of congressional Republicans to cut a deal with Pelosi and Schumer to increase spending massively? Yes, that Trump.
The money California will need to rebuild will take a trillion. DOSE needs to cut three trillion now.
There is one configuration that has worked to reduce deficits. Republican congress, with a Democratic president. Nothing gets done, no big spending bills get passed and no big tax cuts get signed by the president. We had better deficit outturns in both the latter 6 years of Clinton and latter 6 years of Obama than in other settings.
The article is absurd, and most of it can be ignored.
The comment thread is surprisingly good with FR understanding that this problem is enormous. We do have a few who want to use it to bolster their Never Trump hatred of reality, but math doesn’t care about that.
Here is what math cares about.
Currently $37 Trillion. About $6 trillion is owed to the Federal Reserve, whose QE created money-from-thin-air was used to buy Treasury issuance of bonds (aka loaned the money being borrowed by Treasury). This $6 trillion is paid interest by Treasury, but the Fed returns that interest back to Treasury. There was a brief time when this returned interest camouflaged itself as income (tax revenue), but I **think** that was cleaned up. If not, the deficit is worse than reported.
The interest rate on this debt is the composite of all the maturity levels. Meaning some is 3 month T bills and some is 7 year and 10 year and 30 year T notes and T bonds. That composite is 3.5%, and rising as the 0% interest items of 5 years ago roll off.
3.5% of $31 Trillion is about $1.1 Trillion. And rising as the 3.5% number rises and as the $31 Trillion rises. One good thing is out there on this. The Fed is now doing QT (Quantitative Tightening to undo Quantitative Ease) and this reduces slowly that $6T on deposit with them. This has no impact on interest, though, since they return that to Treasury.
But $1.1 Trillion. In interest. The deficit will come in about $2 Trillion this year. Over half of that can’t be controlled.
So stop thinking anyone has any ability to control any of this. It has gone too far. There is no solution. And it’s getting worse each year as that $2 Trillion is added to the debt and the interest rate rises (as it must unless we want 8% inflation forever — which btw would require that much increase in government spending just to hold it even).
No solution.
Ironically, inflation IS the solution, it’s just a brutally painful one.
Inflate away the debt has been a popular phrase for a long time.
There is an obvious problem with it. It also inflated away assets. The price of a house goes up, but the measurement of “up” is in dollars that are worth less.
This get discussed now and then.
The only imaginable answer is outright execution of a significant proportion of the population, emphasizing the rich since a 50% cull of people, and confiscation of their inheritance, will not generate much money since the asset distribution across the population is uneven.
You’ll have to kill the rich and confiscate all inheritance.
Not gonna happen.
No solution.
We better watch posting such ‘blasphemy’ on FR
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