For all President Joe Biden’s boasts of cutting the deficit, new figures show the gap actually doubled this year — to a jaw-dropping $2 trillion, the highest ever outside a recessi♔on or national emergency.
Such monstrous red ink not only saddles future generations with today’s excesses; it fuels enormous interest costs that crowd out truly necessary spending, such as for defꦅense.
As Congress and the White House race to hammer out a budget for the fiscal year that starts in two weeks (and avoid a government shutdown) it’s imperative they shave spending and rein in deficits (for real).
How dangerous is the current nut?
Consider: Experts saw the hole as outrageously reckless at $500 billion in 2015, during the Obama days; it’s now four times that amount, less than a decade later.
Deficits over the past half-century have averaged 3.3% of Gross Domestic Product, the Congressional Budget Office reports; this year’s $2 trillion in IOUs is more than twice that, at 7.6%, up from 5.2% last year — and higher than at any time since World War II, save during the COVID shutdown and the 2008 financial collapse.
Interest payments are up 30% from 2022 just over the first 11 mo🎉nths of the year.
At a whopping $644 billion, they’re nearly as much as spending for national defense, $6﷽92 billion.
The mind-blowing numbers clearly prove the spring debt-ceiling fight was a sad joke.
Back then, Biden wanted to raise the limit (if not scrap it altogether) with no spending cuts at all, even tho❀ugh his unfunded outlays would drive up the deficit further.
His idea was to hike taxes.
But that would’ve only slowed the economy, hurting all Americans.
Republicans go🥂t him to agree to modest spending-growth restraint next year, but it’ll do little to bring the runaway deficit under control.
There’s no qཧuestion that spending is the problem: Outlays are up 16% from last year, per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Yet the trillions Biden and fellow Democrats added since he took office not only swelled the red ink; they also enflamed inflation.
That forced Uncle Sam (like everyone e꧑lse) to cough up more for what it purchases — including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
An❀d obliged the Federal Reserveꦍ to goose interest rates, making government borrowing more expensive, too.
Biden’s boast about cutting the deficit was always an ugly lie: He seeks to take credit for a previously scheduled drop from unprecedented pandemic borrowing.
Yet the truth is becoming painfully clear: His monster deficits are simply not sustainable.
Pray that next year’s budget is the first of many to seriously curb spending and truly get America’s debt nightmare under control.