The recent White House budget proposal was an exercise in misdirection and spin. The budget document reaffirmed the president’s $2.4 trillion Build Back Better proposal, but simply left its massive cost out of the tax-and-spending tables. To make matters more confusing, the other tax-hike proposals that did appear in the budget were scored under a baseline that assumes Build Back Better has already been enacted.
Such economic sophistry has become a trend under President Biden.
White House economic spin is as old as the modern presidency. George W. Bush and Donald Trump portrayed their tax cuts as the most revolutionary economic growth engines in modern history. Bill Clinton took credit for balanced budgets and a late-1990s economic boom that were almost totally unrelated to presidential policies. Barack Obama spun a far-weaker-than-expected recovery from his inherited recession as a magical triumph of economic management.
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in National Review Online