The president’s budget request for 2025, unveiled this week, is for an unprecedented $7.3 trillion in government expenditures. This president’s most recent budget, said Biden’s team, shows his “commitment to economic restraint.”
Simply put, that is ridiculous. “Joe Biden” and “fiscal responsibility” are two terms that should never go together.
There was $27.7 trillion in national debt on Biden’s inauguration day, January 20, 2021. The national debt had increased to $34.5 trillion a little over three years later.
The estimated increase in the national debt to $46.6 trillion in four years’ time does not account for any further expenditure plans.
The Biden administration is not solely responsible for the nation’s financial crisis; this is clear. Spending recklessly is unfortunately one of the few things that both parties can agree on in Washington, DC, today.
The expenditure situation has gotten much worse over the past several years, and it is fair to say that Biden is partially responsible for that.
The US will have weathered the pandemic’s worst wave by January 2021. There had already been a national expenditure of trillions of dollars on so-called pandemic relief efforts at that point.
Still, the Biden administration wasted little time turning on the government spending tap like never before. The massive American Rescue Plan and the $1 trillion Infrastructure Act are just two examples of how the Biden administration has been relentless in its pursuit of ever-increasing federal spending.
The national debt’s interest payments have also increased dramatically. The United States government spent a substantial amount of $527 billion in 2020 on interest payments on the national debt. A whopping $875 billion was the total by the year 2024.
Forecasts indicate that interest payments on the national debt will cost the United States government approximately $1 trillion in 2025 and will surpass $1.6 trillion per year by 2035. That is, assuming, of course, that no new expenditure projects are launched in the interim. Indeed, according to estimates, the interest payments on the national debt will cost the United States government $12.5 trillion in only the next ten years.
In contrast, the total allocation for the Department of Defense in 2024 amounted to $848.9 billion. Put another way, the annual cost of paying down the national debt has surpassed the cost of safeguarding our nation, all because of decades of careless spending by both major political parties.
The present course of action cannot continue indefinitely. The time to make significant, fundamental changes is now.
Increasing taxes is the solution, according to some, including Biden and nearly all Democrats in Congress. There are a plethora of additional levies proposed by Biden in his budget for 2025.
Taxing people out of this situation is not going to fix anything, as anyone with a fundamental understanding of math and economics will tell you. Indeed, increasing taxes, particularly on those who generate jobs, will likely exacerbate the problem by dampening private sector job creation and economic development.
The ideal course of action would be to slash expenditure everywhere, but this will be politically impossible with the present leadership and Congress.
The last time the United States government had a surplus in its budget was nearly twenty years ago. Also, for the foreseeable future, yearly budget deficits will be more than $1 trillion. Let the insanity cease.
The good news is that there is still time. We could be out of this sticky fiscal jam in no time if the US government only curtailed wasteful expenditures.
Timely resolution of the issue is possible, for example, if the federal government adopts a strategy that aligns federal spending with the consumer price index (CPI) and uses benchmarking expenditure based on the budgeting practices of the 50 states and similar governments worldwide.
If implemented, CPI-X: A Novel Method to Decrease Spending and the National Debt will do miracles for the US budget and restore fiscal stability in ten years. Strong economic growth, reduced taxation, and improved government services would all be hallmarks of an economic renaissance.
For an excessive amount of time, the United States government has exceeded its constitutional boundaries, resulting in massive debt, a plethora of bureaucrats, and a federal government that is dysfunctional and causes more harm than good.
That ought not to persist. People like us should get well. We should expect the federal government to adhere to the same principle of fiscal restraint as all American households and local governments.
Author: Scott Dowdy
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