Federal spending has risen 40 percent since 2019 — much faster than the economy, resulting in skyrocketing national debt.
“What programs are behind the largest increases in the table? Agriculture: food stamps. Education: college aid and pandemic school aid…. Labor: PBGC aid to troubled pension plans. Treasury: interest costs….International Aid: Ukraine. SBA: disaster loans,” notes economist Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. Biden is proposing a further “8 percent increase for 2024.”
If Democrats regain control of Congress in 2024, Biden is likely to proposed much larger budgets. Right now, the Republican-controlled House has made it impossible for Biden to push his pet projects, such as his $5 trillion Build Back Better plan, and his plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing obsolete forms of transportation such as passenger rail in rural areas, which could interfere with the freight railroads that efficiently transport much of America’s goods.
Biden’s massive federal spending has caused inflation, according to economists like Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, and Obama advisor Steven Rattner. As Rattner noted in the New York Times last year, Biden spent “an unprecedented amount” of taxpayer money, which resulted in “too much money chasing too few goods.”
The spending would be even greater if federal judges had not blocked Biden’s costly plan to forgive $10,000 or $20,000 in student loan debt for many borrowers, at a cost to taxpayers of $500 billion. That $500 billion student loan forgiveness plan was declared illegal by federal judges. But the Biden administration has appealed the judges’ rulings, asking the Supreme Court to reinstate the student loan forgiveness plan because it claims, among other things, that the challengers were the wrong people to challenge the plan, and thus lack legal standing to challenge it. It is unlikely that the Supreme Court will find Biden’s plan to be legal, but it is quite possible that the Supreme Court will rule than none of the people who sued over it had standing to challenge it, resulting in Biden illegally spending the $500 billion and getting away with it.
Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, called Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan “reckless.” Furman says, “Pouring roughly a half-trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.” Biden’s plan will increase economic inequality and the national debt, as even the liberal Washington Post has recognized.
