(RepublicanWire.org) – CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale looked in to President Joe Biden’s claim that he had reduced the deficit.
Since Biden’s has taken office, there has been record-setting inflation and still-rising gas prices. President Biden insisted last Wednesday that he had decreased the federal deficit. “Let me remind you again, I reduced the federal deficit,” Biden said.
On CNN “New Day” Monday morning, Dale did some digging to find out if Biden’s claim was true.
Dale started off by saying that the deficit had fallen in the first year of Biden’s presidency. However, he said it had nothing to do with anything Biden had done.
“There is no doubt that the deficit has fallen under President Biden so far,” he said. “It was about $3.1 trillion under President Trump in fiscal 2020, it was about $360 billion lower than that, so about $2.8 trillion, in fiscal 2021 mostly under President Biden.”
“Experts I spoke to still scoffed at the idea that President Biden is personally responsible for having reduced the deficit. In fact, one advocate of deficit reduction, Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that this claim is almost bizarro world, a reversal of reality,” Dale continued.
Dale went on to note that the deficit was expected to fall by more than $360 billion anyway. He added that the Congressional Budget Office had predicted it would fall by more than $870 billion “if President Biden did not implement new policy.”
Dale’s conclusion was that the shortfall between the expected deficit reduction and the actual reduction was a direct result of policies that were implemented by the Biden administration. One of those policies was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
“Whatever you think of all those policies, they all cost money,” Dale said. “So there ended up being less deficit reduction than expected.”
Dale also consulted Dan White, a senior director at Moody’s Analytics, White told Dale, “The actions of this administration and Congress have undoubtedly resulted in higher deficits, not smaller ones. It is encouraging that the administration has proposed some initiatives to bring down the deficit, but so far none of those initiatives have been seriously considered.”