RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Joe Biden brags that the budget he released on Monday would cut the deficit by $3 trillion, even while offering truckloads of new goodies to Americans.

That will get headlines.

What won’t make the news is the fact that his Fiscal 2025 budget provides clear and incontrovertible evidence that he has caused a fiscal and economic disaster of epic proportions.

How do we know this? Because buried in the back of the annual budget document is a table called “Baseline by Category.” This is a forecast of spending, revenues, and deficits that would result if the government is left on autopilot.

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.

How is that possible, when Biden claims that he’s cut the deficit by more than any president in history?

Let’s look at the details.

Under Biden, taxes have gone up, but spending has gone up much, much faster.

Revenues under the Biden baseline are expected to come in $2.6 trillion higher than under the Trump baseline.

But Biden added $5.5 trillion to Trump’s spending “baseline.”

Biden has increased the size of government across the board. A huge driver of that spending increase is the massive increase in net interest on the debt, which resulted from his spendthrift ways that fueled Bidenflation.

The nearby chart below shows the differences between the Trump and Biden baselines.

The economy is also worse off than it would have been had Biden done nothing.

Biden’s first budget, issued soon after he took office, projected 4.3% growth in real GDP in 2022. The actual result was 1.9%.

In other words, Biden’s “Rescue America Plan” ended up cutting economic growth more than half!

Where he initially projected 1.9% growth this year, he now pegs it at 1.7%.

Inflation was supposed to be 2.1% from 2021 through this year. The reality: prices spiked to 4.7% in 2021, then went up to 8% in 2022 and 4.2% in 2023. Inflation this year will be higher than Biden initially projected, coming in at 2.9%.

Meanwhile, interest rates in 2022 were 10 times as high as Biden projected when he took office. In 2023, he projected rates of 0.4% — they topped 5%. And this year, where rates were projected to be 0.8%, Biden now pegs them at 5.1%.

Worse, in his current budget, Biden doubles down on this record of failure. He wants to sharply increase both spending and taxes, and would still leave a $1.6 trillion annual hole in the budget as far as the eye can see.

This is Biden’s true legacy. And if he’s allowed to dig the hole any deeper, we might never be able to climb out.