What Lies to Watch for During Biden’s SOTU
After the U.S. reached its debt ceiling, there’s no question the president will demagogue the issue.
President Joe Biden, every bit of age 80 and then some, will do his best to read his State of the Union Address from the teleprompters tonight, but we already know two things: It won’t be pretty and it won’t be even remotely true.
Biden is what he himself might call a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” The truth simply isn’t in him. And given how chock-full of lies his last SOTU was, we expect tonight will be no different, even if it’s Kevin McCarthy behind him instead of Nancy Pelosi.
For example, negotiations are ongoing over raising the debt ceiling again. Biden will almost certainly lie about how he’s cut the deficit, which is both an accident of timing and bereft of context. You can’t raise the deficit and then (honestly) brag when you lower it. When Biden took office as vice president in 2009, the national debt was roughly $11 trillion. It has now surpassed $31 trillion. The COVID spending binge under Donald Trump (and congressional Democrats) accounts for roughly $5 trillion of that increase. Most of the rest of it was on Biden’s watch, so he can spare us the charade of fiscal responsibility.
Economist Stephen Moore quips, “Biden is like a schoolkid celebrating an improved report card because the first semester he got an F but the second semester a D-minus.”
Biden will also no doubt lie about inflation, gas prices, immigration, and so on. Word on the street is that one of the things he’ll call for tonight is a new tax on billionaires. As our Jack DeVine recently noted, “$31.4 trillion is an incomprehensibly huge amount of money; for example, that would be the combined wealth of 31,400 billionaires (if that many existed — there are only about 3,000 in the world).”
In other words, whatever class warfare Biden uses to make the argument for taxing billionaires, even confiscating every last penny of their wealth wouldn’t put a dent in the federal debt he’s been a part of ringing up since he arrived in the Senate 50 years ago — when the debt was a mere $450 billion.
Speaking of debt, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave a prebuttal speech yesterday, in which he condemned never-ending deficit spending. “Washington fell for a financial fad,” McCarthy said. “That the national debt doesn’t matter.” He explained why it does matter.
Our national debt is high. Too high. And the problem is getting worse, not better. We are now $31 trillion in debt. That is more than the size of the entire American economy — 20% more. Our debt is now a greater burden than it has been at any time since World War II. If we continue down this path, in the next 10 years, we will spend over $8 trillion just on interest. That’s more than the entire federal budget this year by a lot. That is neither affordable nor sustainable. When debt is too high, inflation is the result.
Later, he added:
In 2021, Democrats passed the largest debt limit increase in American history. Then, they maxed out our nation’s credit card again just 13 months later. Now, President Biden wants Congress to raise the debt limit yet again without a single, sensible change to how government spends your hard-earned money. None.
“Does that sound responsible to you?” he asked.
No, and neither does Joe Biden or whoever’s pulling his strings from behind the scenes. Again, for the last 50 years, Biden has done nothing but concoct new ways to spend your great-great-grandchildren’s money. He has been a key part of The Swamp that took debt from $450 billion to $31.4 trillion, but he’s going to tell you how responsible he is. When he does, try not to break your TV by throwing something at it. After all, TVs are more expensive now, thanks to Big Spending Joe.