Back in 2022, I criticized President Biden because all of his major initiatives were increasing the burden of government spending, writes Dan Mitchell.
And it’s gotten worse since that column. Here’s a partial list of government expansions during the Biden years.
- The failed so-called stimulus bill.
- The pork-filled infrastructure bill.
- The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
- The cronyist subsidies for Big Tech.
How much damage has been caused by these pieces of legislation, as well as his other fiscal policies?
According to new research from Matt Dickerson at the Economic Policy Innovation Center, Biden has increased the cost of government by nearly $1 trillion. And that was the total just for 2023.
Here’s the most important table from the study, and it shows final budget numbers from the 2023 fiscal year compared to Congressional Budget Office projections for 2023 when Biden took office. It’s all bad news, and I’ve highlighted the worst news in red.
To elaborate, the CBO does 10-year fiscal projections two times each year.
Their projection in February 2021, just after Biden took office, was that the burden of government spending would reach $5.16 trillion.
That was assuming if nothing changed.
But Biden made changes. All of them bad. So the final outcome for 2023 was a spending burden of $6.13 trillion. That’s a staggering $969.6 billion of additional money diverted from the private sector to politicians and bureaucrats.
If Biden was being graded, that deserves an F.
But I don’t want people to think I’m being partisan. If we look at the Trump years, CBO predicted at the start of 2017 that spending in 2019 would be $4.33 trillion.
Actual spending was $4.45 trillion, meaning Trump added $113 billion to America’s fiscal burden in his first two years.
My partisan Republican friends will say that this makes Trump better (or less worse) because $113 billion is a lot less than $969 billion.
That’s true, but my partisan Democratic friends may have the last laugh because CBO in early 2017 predicted that 2021 spending (Trump’s last fiscal year) would be $4.82 trillion and it wound up being $6.82 trillion.
So Trump increased America’s fiscal burden by $2 trillion over four years. More than twice as irresponsible as Biden.
Though Biden’s $969 billion increase was over two years, so he is on pace to almost exactly match Trump’s profligacy.
In other words, they may wind up being tied. That being said, this who-can-spend-the-most contest does have a clear loser…the American people.
