Wednesday, March 1, 2023

When It Comes to Debt, Joe Biden is the Six Trillion Dollar Man: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Biggest Presidential Spender of Them All? ... On the Debt Limit Fight, It’s Time To End Business As Usual, and related stories

NY Post composite
When it comes to debt, Joe Biden is the Six Trillion Dollar Man:
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest presidential spender of them all?
Joe Biden wins that award by a landslide. That’s the depressing result from our new study at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, based on the latest official money and budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office.
This may be a surprising conclusion given that Biden keeps touting his line that “we’ve cut the deficit drastically.” He even claims that last year he slashed the deficit by more than $1.4 trillion while boasting that this is “the largest debt reduction in American history.”
Every president has been prone to a bit of exaggeration on their record in office, but this one isn’t even within the galaxy of the truth.
Our new analysis of the latest CBO forecast covering the next 10 years reveals the most rapid deterioration of the federal balance sheet ever.
We compared the 10-year fiscal outlook the month Donald Trump left office with the latest forecast just two years later. This comparison indicates some $6.5 trillion of red ink ADDED by Biden to the Trump baseline he inherited. In other words, instead of Biden engineering “the largest debt reduction in history,” Biden has accomplished the polar opposite result: the largest debt INCREASE in American history.”
Here are the numbers: --->READ MORE HERE
Wong Yu Liang / Getty Images
On the Debt Limit Fight, It’s Time To End Business As Usual:
President Joe Biden has called for an increase in the debt ceiling. To avoid another fight with Congress on the issue ahead of the 2024 elections, he would need lawmakers to boost the current ceiling by roughly $2.5 trillion. This would allow for total debt of about $34 trillion, or 130% of the economy.
But Biden does not simply want a higher debt limit. He wants the limit to be “suspended” and unaccompanied by additional reforms. Congress should reject Biden’s bid and instead use the debt limit to strengthen the economy.
The debt limit was last suspended by Congress from August 2019 until July 2021. Over those 23 months, total federal debt increased by approximately $6.4 trillion, or $280 billion per month. That spending spree included COVID-19 relief under President Donald Trump and Biden’s $1.8 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” In July 2021, Congress fed the folly, raising the limit by about $3 trillion to help accommodate last year’s $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill.
It is not irrational for a president to want unlimited and unchecked borrowing capacity. However, it is imprudent for Congress to allow it. A debt limit suspension, paired with no limits on the Federal Reserve’s ability to purchase government debt, would provide Biden with near endless capacity to use his “pen and phone” to runaround Congress. This opens the door for the president to indulge in more policies like his unilateral, and likely illegal, student-loan forgiveness plan.
The debt limit gives Congress the opportunity to strengthen the economy and to ensure that it remains resilient. Congress should begin by adopting Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal to cap discretionary spending growth at 1% per year, which would reduce the projected deficit by about $1 trillion.
But Congress shouldn’t stop there. --->READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to related stories:

How to end the U.S. debt ceiling standoff: Reduce entitlements and hammer out a bipartisan compromise

America’s going bust: Debt-ceiling talks must head off disaster

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