The White House tries to spin economic straw into political gold.
The White House doesn’t have much good economic news to report these days, so sometimes it pretends that the straw it’s selling is really gold. That was the case Friday when President Biden and his economic advisers claimed that a $1.4 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2022 was a great fiscal and economic success.
In recent speeches, President Joe Biden has been misleadingly taking credit for cutting federal deficits by historic amounts, though most of the reduction in deficits is the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending. Deficits fell between fiscal year 2020 and 2021 far less than initially projected after Biden added to them with more emergency pandemic and infrastructure spending.
And the deficits under Biden and beyond are projected to remain historically high compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Another Devil’s advocate © 2021. All rights reserved.
