Just days before the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its updated report on the Biden administration’s deficits. In February, the shortfall between revenues and expenses was a mind-bending $1.5 trillion.
Since then — in just four months — the CBO now estimates the Biden deficit this year to exceed $1.9 trillion. That’s a 27-percent increase in just four months, and it will likely provide fodder for Trump during Thursday night’s debate.
Trump, given the opportunity, will likely remind viewers that “lyin’ Joe” said in March that his administration has been “delivering real results in fiscally responsible ways,” adding that his administration had “already cut the federal deficit by over $1 trillion.”
In May Biden reiterated the lie: “People have more health insurance than they ever did before and we still cut the deficit.”
The real numbers — like the size of the universe — are simply too large to fully grasp. But the consequences are showing up everywhere. As the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury struggle to deal with how to pay the government’s bills, the pressure to print rather than borrow will only increase.
At present, taxpayers are fleeced to the tune of nearly $5 trillion a year. But that still falls $2 trillion short of what the government is expected to spend: almost $7 trillion.
And that’s just this fiscal year, which ends in September. The CBO has done Trump another favor: It estimates that, if nothing is done, the national debt, currently at $35 trillion and counting (see the National Debt Clock here), will approach $60 trillion in the next 10 years.
Here’s why the CBO got it wrong in February, and now corrects itself in June:
• Biden’s illegal and unconstitutional forgiveness of student-loan debt. As Byron York, writing for the Washington Examiner, put it: “Biden couldn’t get Congress to do it, and he couldn’t get the courts to approve it, so now he is just doing it in big chunks on what he says is his executive authority alone and daring anyone to stop him.”
• Military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
• Electric-vehicle subsidies
• Expansion of healthcare subsidies
And interest on the national debt. The U.S. Treasury currently pays out over $1 trillion in interest on the nation’s debt every quarter. And with the increase of $400 billion in deficits since February, the CBO was forced to add another $22 billion to that quarterly total, and to its revised deficit number.
To put this into perspective, the U.S. economy, increasingly burdened by governmental intrusions and regulations, currently generates a little over $25 trillion in goods and services. It’s growing at less than two percent a year, far below the growth in the national debt. Assuming that the U.S. Treasury won’t be able to find buyers for all that new debt, it will fall to the printing press to make up the shortfall. The resulting destruction in the purchasing power of the currency — a virtual additional tax on every wage earner — will continue to drive prices at the pump and the grocery store ever higher. This provides another talking point for Trump in Thursday night’s debate, if the CNN shills casting “gotcha questions” for the former president will allow him to speak about it.
Biden’s reckless — some say intentional — destruction of the dollar continues to show up in the polls. When asked about Biden’s performance on the economy and on inflation, the numbers are the same: Six out of 10 disapprove of his performance on each issue.
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