Debate Fact Check: No, Trump's Debt and Deficits Were NOT Higher Than Biden's

Just as we expected, Biden regurgitated the phony claim by leftwing think tanks that Trump was a bigger borrower than he has been.

As Stephen Moore demonstrated in the weekend edition of his Committee to Unleash Prosperity Hotline, the claim isn't even close to being true.

(If you haven’t subscribed to the Hotline you really should, it is free and a great resource to fuel the conservative position in coffee break debates on the election.)

Here is Steve’s chart comparing deficits.

Trump would have done better if he had listened to conservative proposals to hold the line on spending, but Biden's deficits are larger, even if we included the COVID year 2020. Trump's deficits are roughly $1.4 trillion a year and Biden's are closer to $2 trillion a year.

In 2019, the last full year of Trump spending the deficit was under $1 trillion ($984 billion), thanks mostly to the shift in control of the House of Representatives after Democrats made a net gain of 41 seats in the 2018 midterm elections. In contrast, the first full year of Biden’s spending, with Democrat control of Congress and no Republican firewall, Democrats drove the deficit up to $2.772 trillion, almost three times the final Trump deficit.

While Democrats claim the Biden Administration increased the federal deficit by just $4.3 trillion. As the House Budget Committee explained, in reality, the Biden Administration has increased the federal deficit by $11.6 trillion dollars throughout the last three years and six months, including:

$4.8 trillion in enacted legislation;

$4.8 trillion in higher interest costs; and,

$2 trillion by executive actions

The Washington Examiner also ran the numbers after the debate and came to the same conclusion: The president to approve the greatest deficit increase during his tenure is Joe Biden.

Using monthly data from Treasury Department, Tiana Lowe Doescher documented that Trump spent $5.9 trillion more than he brought in from January 2017 to December 2020.

To compare that to Biden, she used two sources of data: adding together the existing Treasury data from January 2021 through September 2023, $5.3 trillion in compound deficit, and then the deficit projection by the Congressional Budget Office for fiscal 2024, which runs from October 2023 through September of this year, $1.9 trillion. The total then comes to about $7.2 trillion. It’s not a perfect four-year comparison, but it comes close. This is also a more meaningful measure than merely comparing the overall levels of debt held by the public because of the Treasury’s idiosyncratic excess cash reserves during the pandemic.

Another way to measure this, observed Ms. Lowe Doescher, is to compare the CBO’s annual budgets, which adhere to the fiscal year calendars. This means this estimate will include the September through December of the previous presidency, but we get a better comparison of exactly four years of Trump and four years of Biden.

Trump racked up $5.6 trillion of debt from fiscal 2017 through fiscal 2020, according to the CBO. From fiscal 2021 through the projected fiscal 2024, Biden will have accumulated $7.8 trillion in debt.

Although the deficit has reverted closer to pre-pandemic levels as the United States winds down pandemic spending, unless Congress or the President makes a commitment to deficit reduction, deficits are projected to grow significantly over the coming decades – an ominous trend that will put increased strain on the federal budget, and the taxpayers who fund it.

Thanks to big spenders on Capitol Hill, Trump could hardly be accused of fiscal restraint, but no president in history has proved as wasteful as Biden, so if you care about deficit reduction Donald Trump is your candidate in this race.

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