Biden Spending Would Bring $1.8T Deficit

Aides point to public support for president's plan
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted May 27, 2021 4:37 PM CDT
Biden Spending Would Bring $1.8T Deficit
President Biden listens during a tour Thursday of the Cuyahoga Community College Manufacturing Technology Center.   (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Biden's $6 trillion budget proposal for next year would run a $1.8 trillion federal government deficit despite a raft of new tax increases on corporations and high-income people designed to pay for his spending plans. Biden had already announced his major budget initiatives, but during a rollout Friday, he will wrap them into a single proposal to incorporate into the government's existing budget framework, including Social Security and Medicare. That provides a fuller view of the administration's fiscal posture, the AP reports. The whopping deficit projections are being driven by Biden's costly plans for infrastructure and social spending, along with major new investments in domestic Cabinet agencies. The budget incorporates the administration's eight-year, $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal and its $1.8 trillion American Families Plan and adds details on his $1.5 trillion request for annual operating appropriations for the Pentagon and domestic agencies.

The Biden budget is sure to give a boost to Republicans' criticisms of the new Democratic administration as bent on a "tax-and-spend" agenda with resulting deficits that would damage the economy and impose a crushing debt burden on younger Americans. Huge deficits have yet to drive up interest rates as many fiscal hawks have feared, however, and anti-deficit sentiment among Democrats has mostly vanished. "Now is the time to build (upon) the foundation that we've laid to make bold investments in our families and our communities and our nation," Biden said Thursday in Cleveland. "We know from history that these kinds of investments raise both the floor and the ceiling over the economy for everybody." The Biden team says public sentiment is on its side, citing recent opinion polls that show the public largely approves of ideas like boosting spending for roads and bridges and better broadband, as well as its plans to raise taxes on corporations and upper-bracket earners.

(More budget deficit stories.)

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