The Fiscal Shell Game

Last week, President Biden submitted a budget to Congress for fiscal year 2024 that White House spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre claimed will cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next 10 years. For 2 ½ years, Joe Biden and the Democrats could not have cared less about the deficit and national debt. Biden signed three multi-trillion-dollar wasteful spending bills into law in his first two years in office – $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, and the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. In less than 2 years, Biden added almost $4 trillion of new government spending, ballooned the national debt to over $30 trillion, and drove inflation to a 40 year high. He spent as if there were no tomorrow. It was probably the most irresponsible amount of wasteful spending in United States history. And now as the 2024 election cycle is within a year, Joe Biden is claiming to be a budget hawk. Do not believe him. It is like everything else that he says – a lie. It’s a sham, a charade, a shell game.

Democrats are very adept at mixing words to confuse people so they can make claims that are misleading. They interchange the terms, “the deficit” and “the debt” all the time to serve their purposes. The “deficit” is the yearly shortfall between the amount of money we spend and the amount of money we take it. The “debt” is the accumulated yearly deficits over the history of our country. They are two entirely different things, but the Democrats continually say “deficit” hoping that the average citizen will think of our $30+ trillion “debt”. When Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden’s budget cuts the projected deficits by $3 trillion, it does not reduce the $31.4 trillion national debt to $28.4 trillion. That’s what they want you to think. His budget claims to reduce the projected deficits by $3 trillion over ten years, but unless he cuts the deficit to zero which his budget doesn’t come anywhere close to doing, the debt will increase dramatically.

Biden’s projected deficit reduction is factored off of the $4 trillion of new spending bills that he has signed and added to government over the last two years. So, Biden comes in the office and drives up our deficit to ungodly levels in order to pay off all the people who got him elected, and then proposes a spending bill which will moderately reduce the out-of-control spending that he signed into law, and wants to be lauded for being fiscally responsible. That is like a man gaining 100 pounds, and then bragging about losing 20 pounds afterward. He still is at plus 80 pounds from where he started.

Biden learned this technique from the master manipulator, Barack Hussein Obama who is most likely the author of Biden’s 2024 budget. When Obama took office in 2009, the previous fiscal year deficit was $400 billion. He proceeded to sign a series of spending bills which totaled well over $2 trillion and ballooned the deficit to over $1.2 trillion. The Democrat controlled Congress did not pass a budget in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, so all the new spending Obama signed into law was carried over with the $1 trillion+ deficits for those years. Then in 2012 – an election year, Obama submitted a budget which reduced the deficit that he created from $1.2 trillion down to $600 billion, and then he campaigned on the claim that he “cut the deficit in half” even though the deficit was 50% higher in 2012 then the day he took office in 2009. This is all a shell game. It is all about manipulating people.

In reality, the United States needs to cut $20 trillion of spending over the next 10 years simply to balance the yearly budget. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has pointed out that according to Biden’s own budget, "in the next 10 years, Americans will pay $10.5 trillion just on the interest on our debt” which is not a fiscally responsible budget. But that’s not what they want. They want the appearance of fiscal responsibility without being fiscally responsible. The White House continually claims that Biden has already cut $1.7 trillion from the deficit, pretending that 2020, the year before he took office, was a normal year, and that Covid and the massive government spending needed to keep the country afloat during the Covid lockdowns had never happened. In fact, that $1.7 trillion deficit reduction was already in place before Biden took office. So, all of Biden’s claims at deficit reduction are lies masquerading as the truth.

But this is not something new. Joe Biden has already used this tactic in his Presidency. On his first day in office, he opened our southern border, and has allowed over 5 million illegal immigrants to walk across our border in the first 2 years of his Presidency. And now with the 2024 election is in plain sight. Biden is championing border security, claiming he has implemented new border security measures which has dramatically cut border crossings. But the border crossings are only reduced when compared to the two previous years of ungodly record high numbers of illegal immigrants. He’s not reducing border crossings in comparison to the four years of Trump or to the average yearly boarding crossings over the last 40 years. He is comparing his numbers in 2023 to his complete his wide-open borders of 2021 and 2022, and wants to take credit for it.

But he has his campaign slogan, “I’ve cut illegal border crossings in half” when he actually has doubled them on purpose. And Biden’s border security measures are not actually reducing the number of illegal immigrants who enter our country either. He is using border agents to funnel the illegal immigrants through ports of entry, so they will not be counted as illegal crossers, but as asylum seekers. He only started talking about border security with the 2024 election cycle within sight and after he’s already allowed 5 million new Democrat voters to enter our country illegally.

There is a complete disconnect between the way Democrats campaign and the way they govern. We saw that in 2022, when many of the “defund the police” Democrats campaigned on law and order, and supporting the police. It’s all a lie. Biden doesn’t care about our national debt or fiscal responsibility; he doesn’t care about securing our border and reducing illegal immigration; he doesn’t care about fentanyl and overdose deaths; he doesn’t care about violent crime in our major cities, because he has chosen not addressed any of these issues in his first two years in office. If he did care, he would have spent his political capital passing legislation that dealt with those issues in 2021 and 2022, rather than spending his political capital to payback his campaign donors, and only waiting until the 2024 election cycle is less than a year away to pretend like he is doing something about those issues he claims to care about now.

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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.