The administration continues to be slippery on budget issues.
The Biden White House has found a new way to make its spending-and-tax proposals appear less expensive: Simply don’t count them in the budget totals.
The president’s long-awaited (and delayed) fiscal year 2023 budget counts as the first “real” budget proposal of the Biden administration. (These budgets usually take more than a year to produce, and so last year’s version by a brand-new administration was understandably rushed and truncated.) This year’s budget was expected to flesh out the details of President Biden’s incredibly expensive agenda.
At first glance, Biden proposes $1.4 trillion in additional spending and $2.5 trillion in new taxes over the decade. Discretionary spending, education, and public health increases would be matched with massive corporate tax hikes. By 2032, the deficit would rise to $1.8 trillion, and total deficits would exceed $14 trillion over the next decade. Still, the White House points to federal spending reaching 23.9 percent of GDP, and taxes reaching 19.1 percent of GDP a decade from now—significantly higher than normal, but not revolutionary.
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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 The Dispatch