On Sunday, President Joe Biden tweeted, “We’re making investments in America and reducing the deficit at the same time. In my first two years in office, we reduced the deficit by $1.7 trillion. And the budget agreement I negotiated cuts it by another trillion.” The White House had previously touted the fact this is “the largest decline in American history.”
But the picture Biden paints of himself as some sort of fiscally responsible wizard — who has been able to reduce the deficit by unprecedented amounts — is incredibly misleading.
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It is accurate to say the deficit dropped between 2020 and 2022, but the reason has nothing to do with Biden’s supposedly masterful policymaking.
Let’s start in 2020. The deficit was the highest in American history in 2020 because of unprecedented — yet temporary — spending in response to COVID-19. With help from both Republicans and Democrats, the $2.2 trillion CARES Act was signed into law in late March 2020, right as the pandemic began. Then, in December, another $900 billion relief bill was passed and made law. The massive spending in these two packages was in addition to the regular spending the federal government does, which has exceeded the amount received through tax revenue every year since 2001.
In 2021, the deficit was $2.77 trillion, as Democrats passed yet more big spending bills even though inflation began to rise at the beginning of the year.
By the time we got to 2022 — the year Biden contrasts 2020 with in terms of deficits in order to claim he is fiscally responsible — the deficit was $1.38 trillion and the pandemic was largely over. As such, the out-of-control spending in response to COVID-19 was also over. This meant the crazy deficits driven by that spending came down. But this was going to happen no matter who was president.
He made no actual cuts to spending in order to make the deficit come down. It was just a return to the baseline when there were no more COVID-19 relief packages.
This is why Biden’s statement is so misleading.
To make matters worse, data show that neither spending nor the deficit has actually returned to pre-pandemic levels since. The deficit in 2022 was higher than any non-COVID-19 year since 2009 — the year President Barack Obama signed a huge stimulus bill in response to the last major economic crisis. So while Biden makes it seem that by “cutting the deficit” he is more fiscally responsible than previous presidents, he actually has worse deficits even after the pandemic spending finished.
He helped usher in a new normal of deficit spending that exceeds $1 trillion.
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It should be no surprise that Biden is misleading on this issue, as it is a common occurrence for him when it comes to economic policy. For example, he makes the same claims on jobs and inflation over and over again even though they have been soundly debunked as false or defanged by adding proper context.
It is important to have a president the American people can trust. But with Biden in charge, nearly every statistic sent out by the administration and then parroted by talking heads crumbles upon even a little scrutiny.
Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.