Unsustainable Spending Runs Wild in Biden Budget

On March 11, 2024, President Biden released his budget proposal for the U.S. government’s 2025 fiscal year. It’s a remarkable document because he seeks to permanently lock in the unsustainable spending that characterizes his administration’s fiscal policy.

The editors of Issues & Insights describe the Biden administration’s track record on fiscal policy as “a fiscal and economic disaster of epic proportions.” With the federal government now borrowing $10 billion daily to fund Biden’s spending, the evidence to support that point of view is mounting.

However, I&I’s editors did more than just state their viewpoint. They used President Biden’s budget proposals to back their case.

So, we dug out Biden’s first budget—released in early 2021—to see what the administration said would happen if Biden did nothing. In other words, what would spending, revenues and deficits look like if all of President Donald Trump’s policies remained in effect. Let’s call this the Trump baseline.

Then we compared that with the latest “Baseline” projection in Biden’s new budget—which assumes that all of Biden’s current policies remain in effect for the foreseeable future. We will call this the Biden baseline.

What did we find?

In his latest budget, Biden says that deficits over the next five years will total $9 trillion. Again, that’s assuming that the government is left on autopilot over that time. The Biden baseline puts us on course to borrow a total of $9 trillion from 2025 through 2029.

But the Trump baseline would have produced deficits over these same years of $6.1 trillion.

As a result, we now know that Biden’s policies have boosted projected deficits by $2.9 trillion from 2025 to 2029.

The numbers recorded in Biden’s own budget proposals undermine his claim that his administration’s fiscal policies have reduced the federal government’s annual budget deficits.

However, that’s not the only data in President Biden’s budget proposal undermining his federal budget deficit reduction claims. CNBC’s Brian Sullivan took aim at the President’s claim that implementing his budget would reduce those deficits by $3 trillion over the next 10 years in a tweet:

That’s some really bad deficit math! I wonder if anyone in Washington, D.C. notices you can get the same reduction by reducing the proposed spending by about $0.82 billion per day over 10 years. For an administration already borrowing $10 billion per day, that would be chump change!

The only problem is the government’s proposed deficit spending would still add up to $16 trillion over the next 10 years. Letting that spending run wild for another ten years is still an unsustainable fiscal policy.