President Joe Biden on Thursday released a claim already denounced as fiction, declaring he had reduced America’s budget deficit.

“And by the way, parenthetically, I want you to hear about the deficit. I cut the deficit $1.7 trillion in two years. Nobody’s ever done that – cut the debt $1.7 [trillion],” Biden said during a South Carolina appearance, according to Fox News.

The claim is nothing new, and in April it sufficiently irritated Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker for The Washington Post, to give Biden a severe scolding and assign the claim a rating of “Bottomless Pinocchio.”

The Post usually assigns ratings on a scale of one to four Pinocchios, with four being the worst whoppers.

Kessler said the term was reserved for “false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda.”

Biden had earlier received one for claiming “that he’s traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese president Xi Jinping,” Kessler wrote.

Writing in April, Kessler shared frustration that at least 30 times since June 2022, Biden had trotted out the deficit figure that was wrong. He said that in and of itself the claim was “highly misleading — worthy of Three Pinocchios.”

Writing about his first two budgets, Kessler observed that “All told, in those two years Biden increased the national debt about $850 billion more than originally projected.”

After stating that “the data shows the deficit picture has worsened under Biden,” Kessler noted that “going forward, Biden has enacted legislation that will require the federal government to borrow even more.

“Budget numbers often make people’s eyes glaze over and so, from a communications perspective, it’s easy to manipulate the math. But the numbers don’t lie. The president earns his second Bottomless Pinocchio,” Kessler wrote.

In an Op-Ed in Roll Call, David Winston noted that after a 2020 federal budget that supported one-tine COVID-19 spending,  Biden “saw that supersized budget in 2020 not as a crisis, but an opportunity that could be exploited going forward to pay for what amounted to a historic spending spree.”

He characterized Biden as a big spender.

“If Biden’s 2024 proposed budget actually passed, he would add as much to the national debt as Trump and Bush 43 combined,” he wrote.

He noted that the Congressional Budget Office “projects the annual deficit will be over $1 trillion dollars through 2029, and then it goes over $2 trillion dollars for the years spanning 2030-2033.”

In May, the Congressional Budget Office said that in the first seven months of the 2023 federal fiscal year that began in October, the deficit was nearly $1 trillion, according to Fox.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.