There were a lot of misleading statements in the State of the Union address on Tuesday. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal posted an article about one of these statements.
The article reports:
Presidents typically embellish their achievements during their State of the Union addresses, but President Biden’s pose as a budget deficit hawk is one for the ages.
“By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office,” he said, adding that he will be “the only President ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.”
That’s not by choice.
The article notes:
This assumes Congress doesn’t enact his Build Back Better plan or the more Covid relief he’s asking for.
He’s also using the fiscal 2020 budget as his benchmark. Congress passed $2 trillion in Covid relief in March 2020 to prevent a recession. Both parties piled on $900 billion more that December, and Democrats in March 2021 ladled out nearly $2 trillion more. The deficit is declining because Congress blew it out for two years.
…Inflation is always good for government coffers. Receipts are up 28% during the first four months of this fiscal year. But the Congressional Budget Office still projects deficits to exceed $1 trillion on average over the next decade.
The article concludes:
Mr. Biden is hoping the deficit reduction ruse will lure West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin to go along with more spending. Don’t fall for it, sir.
Remember, statistics can pretty much be manipulated to say anything a statistician wants them to say. President Biden evidently has some good statisticians in his speech writing department.