In Reply to: I saw something recently that the national debt broke posted by UCLADal on August 20, 2026 at 16:35:55
The national deficit has ballooned to $40 trillion, helped along by the GOP’s tax cuts for the rich, President Donald Trump’s disastrous tariffs, and spending on the Iran war. But as Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attempt to do damage control, they are leaning into their one trick: Blame it all on former President Joe Biden.
“Even though the debt is too high, even though we inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration, we actually do have a plan to get the economy growing faster than the debt,” Vance told the vacant faces at Newsmax. “The issue that we’ve had under the Biden administration, and what we’re still kind of dealing with, is that the debt was growing faster than American GDP.”
But why was the deficit so high at the beginning of the Biden administration? Bessent has a completely ahistorical answer for reporters.
“I think the numbers are not the actual numbers now,” Bessent said. “And remember, we did not get here in a day. That we were left with a mess. The Biden administration had the highest deficit-to-GDP in history when we weren’t at war or weren’t in a recession for 2025.”
What was happening between 2021 and 2023 that could have lent itself to massive government spending? I guess we will never know—oh, right, we were in a pandemic. Even the Trump government’s increasingly shady websites still admit that much.